TRUTH 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+BUS INESS ME DI A. B.Y.

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DOI 10.1007/ 978-94-015-9233-8

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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, SATISF ACTION
PETR KOLAR ................................................................................................... 67
DO WE NEED CORRESPONDENCE TRUTH?
FREDERICK STOUTLAND ................................................................................. 81
TARSKIAN 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 DEFLATIONISM
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 valid 5; and despite the fact that even the precise content of the T-
sentences has sometimes been subject to disputes 6 . 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 JAROSLAV 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 language 7 •

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
 TARSKI'S LEGACY: AN INTRODUCTION xi

nontrivial. Thus, Davidson (1969) argues that although the straightforward concept
of correspondence is useless, we may insead develop the correspondence intuition in
a slightly different vein, taking correspondence to be something close to Tarski's
satisfaction. According to this notion of truth as correspondence (which Davidson
later abandoned), a true sentence corresponds not to a fact, but rather to a couple of
individuals.
Another well-known way to save the concept of correspondence is provided by
couching it in some natural-scientific, causal terms. Such is the proposal of Field
(1972), who claims that what Tarski presented is nothing more than the reduction of
the concept of truth to the concept of denotation, and that what is missing is an
explication of the concept of denotation, which should be rendered as a causal
linkage between words and things.
A different approach to the explication of the concept of truth evolves from the
attempt to accommodate truth to something like (ideal) provability or justifiability.
Thus, Dummett (1959) claims that although correspondence theory is untenable (for
"it was an attempt to state a criterion of truth in the sense in which this cannot be
done", p. 14), we do not have to abandon the intuition that if a statement is true, then
there is something in virtue of which it is true. The major twist is that this
'something' is no longer considered to be a fact, but rather ajustification, or a proof
of the true statement in question. This leads Dummett to adopting his intuitionistic
standpoint claiming that "we are entitled to say that a statement P must be either true
or false, only when P is a statement of such a kind that we could in a finite time bring
ourselves into a position in which we were justified either in asserting or in denying
P; that is, when P is an effectively decidable statement." (ibid., p.l6).
The most obvious trouble with such constructivist approaches is that they
necessarily have to involve not only the notions of factual justifications and proofs,
but also those of ideal justifiability and provability. And while it is relatively
straightforward to tell when a statement is justified (i.e. when there - actually - exists
a justification for it), it is far from so straightforward to tell when it is justifiable (i.e.
when a justification for it exists potentially). In fact, what might seem to come
naturally is to explicate justifiability in terms of truth: to say that the condition for a
statement to be justifiable is that it is true.
A completely different approach to the explication of the concept of truth stems
from taking the analysis of the notion of correspondence to imply that there is no
checking whether a sentence corresponds to the world and concluding that being thus
'left uncontrolled by the world' the only thing which we must pay attention to is the
coherence of our theories. Weare free to define and adopt any kind of language we
wish (cf. Camap's, 1934, "Toleranzprincip"), and any kind ofa concept of truth we
consistently define within such a language is acceptable as such - the only thing
which must be avoided is incoherence. From this perspective, being true can be
nothing over and above being an element of a coherent theory (for a thorough
discussion of this stance see Blackburn, 1984, Chapter 7).
The trouble with such explication of the concept of truth is that it is not clear how
we should understand the term coherence. If we construe it simply as consistency,
xii JAROSLAV PEREGRIN

then the explication is obviously somewhat far-fetched: if I now devise a 'language'

by writing down three strings of letters, and define 'truth' in that language by calling
the first of them 'true' and the other two 'false' (which clearly makes up a consistent
language), then I am surely doing something quite different, and incomparably less
interesting and less important, than delimiting the range of true sentences of a
language such as English. And to make the explication more acceptable would
require to explicate coherence as something much more involved, which does not
seem to be a task substantially easier than to explicate truth itself.
However, we may try to improve on the coherentialist idea by realizing that
something is a language only if it is capable of serving a certain specific purpose, of
helping us, in a certain specific way, cope with the world; and that something can be
justly called true only if it has a certain specific role within a language. (The idea is
that we are not 'uncontrolled' by the world, but that the world's control mechanism
is not correspondence, but rather our success or failure.) This may lead to the
conclusion that truth is a certain species of usefulness. This is what can be called a
pragmatic theory of truth.
Such an approach to truth was adopted by the American pragmatists. As Rorty
(1991, p. 127) characterizes the view of William James, the idea was that "'true' was
a term of praise used for endorsing, rather than one referring to a state of affairs the
existence of which explained, e.g., the success of those who held true beliefs". Rorty
himself articulated such a pragmatic notion of truth in a particularly spectacular way
when he claimed that we should see truth as "in James' phrase 'what is better for us
to believe', rather than as 'the accurate representation of reality'" for "the notion of
'accurate representation' is simply an automatic and empty compliment which we
pay to those beliefs which are successful in helping us do what we want to do"
(1980, p.lO) 8.
The trouble with pragmatic theories is that they seem to give us too much
freedom with respect to truth. They seem to open the door for any tyrant to make his
obsessions true by simply coercing people to change their attitudes towards the
world in an appropriate way, by forcing them to find useful new concepts and new
statements. Thus, truth appeares to become far too circumstance-dependent, which is
contrary to the intuition that some of our statements, if they are true, are true forever.

5. "THE FOLLY OF TRYING TO DEFINE TRUTH"

Besides those who keep seeking for an explicit definition of truth, or for a defmite
disclosure of its nature, there are also philosophers who assert that such pursuit is
doomed to be futile; and it is this controversial claim which is, in some form or
another, discussed by the majority of the contributions in the present volume. Those
who hold this view insist that any quest for an explicit theory of truth misses its
quarry because a theory of truth is neither needed, nor possible. However, they argue
towards this conclusion from radically different - in fact opposite - positions: some
of them convinced that truth is too insubstantial to be capable (nor worthy) of being
 TARSKI'S LEGACY: AN INTRODUCTION xiii

defined, others persuaded that truth is, on the contrary, too substantial to be
definable.
The first of these positions is characteristic of the standpoint now usually called
deflationary and recently popularized particularly by Horwich (1990). Deflationists
say that truth is simply not a real concept (that there is no nature of truth, as Horwich
would put it), that all there is to know about the truth-predicate is the T-schema
itself. This means that the truth-predicate, according to them, bears more affiliation
to a syncategorematic term than to a fully-fledged predicate, that it serves a certain
grammatical purpose: namely to formally tum a name of a sentence, i.e. a singular
term, back into a sentence. The T-schema then simply claims that the sentence thus
formed will say the same as the sentence named by the term involved; and the
function of the truth-predicate is thus exhaustively understood once we understand
the schema. From this viewpoint, the preoccupation with the concept of truth
throughout the history of philosophy is not much more than a humbug; and once we
see this, we have many seeming philosophical problems dissolved.
Those who argue for the indefinability of truth from the opposite position agree
that there are no explicitly specifiable truth-governing principles over and above T-
sentences and that T-sentences do not themselves provide an explication of the
nature of truth, but disagree that this is so because there is no such nature. They
rather maintain that truth is not capable of being theoretically explicated - and not in
need of such an explication - because it is a concept so simple and fundamental that
we have no other, simpler or more fundamental concepts which could be seen as
underlying it and thus provide for the explication. This was, indeed, the view of
Frege (1918/9); and it is also the current standpoint of Davidson, who claims that
"truth is one of the clearest and most basic concepts we have, so it is fruitless to dream
of eliminating it in favor of something simpler or more fundamental" (1990, 314) and
therefore points out "the folly of trying to define truth" (1996).

6. ABOUT THIS VOLUME

The papers collected in this volume are selected from the presentations of the Prague
International Colloquium entitled THE NATURE OF TRUTH (IF ANY), which was
organized by the Department of Logic of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy
of Sciences of the Czech Republic and which took place in September 1996. They
concentrate especially on four sub-themes of the great theme of getting a hold on
truth.
The first part is devoted to the discussion of some less known, more or less pre-
Tarskian, views on truth. Gary Kemp considers Frege's view on truth and especially
his claim that any attempt at an explicit definition of truth is bound to end in a
vicious circle. Kemp points out that although on various oversimplified construals (if
'p is true' meant 'p has X', then the truth of p would depend on the truth of 'p has
X') this claim is hardly tenable, there is a way of understanding it which is far from
so easy to reject and which has, as the author claims, wide-ranging implications for
the philosophy of language.
xiv JAROSLAV PEREGRIN

A. W. Carus looks at the view on truth of another classic of analytical philosophy,

Rudolf Carnap. He argues that Carnap held neither a coherence theory (sometimes
attributed to him in his 'syntax period', the early 1930's) nor a correspondence
theory (after 1935), but rather a radical deflationary view that makes even current
deflationists (let alone their opponents) look a bit extravagant and metaphysical. By
contrasting Camap's views with recent writings on truth, Carus makes a case that
Carnap's main ideas were never really assimilated into the analytical mainstream.
The third person whose views are discussed in this part of the book, William
James, is not usually included in the pantheon of analytic philosophy; however, his
influence is undoubtedly crucial for the recent development of (post)analytic
philosophy, especially in the USA. His pragmatist conception of truth is analyzed by
Majeda Omar; she confronts James' views with those of some of his concurrents,
namely Moore, Bradley, Ayer and Sprigge.
The second part of the book is devoted to Tarski and to the question of truth as
correspondence between language and the world. Jan Woleflski defends the claim
that we do need a theory of truth (which is going to be questioned later in the book)
and argues that Tarski offered precisely a theory of the kind we need. He maintains
that Tarski's writings offer deep answers to classical philosophical questions.
Besides this Wolenski argues that it is right to consider Tarski's theory a
correspondence theory of truth - provided we understand 'correspondence' in a
weak (semantic) sense.
Petr KoJar approaches the concept of correspondence from the formal side: the
question he wants to answer is what kind of relation correspondence is or should be.
He rejects the seemingly obvious answer that correspondence is something like an
isomorphism, for, as he argues, the intuitions behind the language-world relation
imply that the realm of statements (or more generally: 'truth-bearers') is structured in
a way unanalogous to that in which the realm of facts ('truth-makers') is structured.
Exploiting these intuitions, he presents a rudimentary formal theory of the
correspondence relation, which aims at rehabilitating correspondence as both a
consistent and a nontrivial notion, and he confronts it with Tarski's conception.
Frederick Stoutland protests against the idea that the concept of correspondence
could add anything nontrivial to our understanding of the concept of truth, and
argues that it is the deflationary approach to truth (to be exposed in detail later in the
book) which is right. He discusses the reasons which are usually presented in support
of the correspondence theory of truth and argues that none of them is entirely
persuasive. Stoutland concludes (following Dorothy Grover) that the truth-predicate
is really a grammatical device which serves to create 'prosentences' which are to
sentences what pronouns are to singular terms; and he also argues that Tarski's
theory in fact gives no comfort to correspondence theorists.
This claim is explicitly rejected by Ilkka Niiniluoto, whose position is close to
that of Wolenski and whose contribution is devoted to a systematic effort to answer
all kinds of objections which have been raised against the correspondence theory of
truth developed along Tarskian lines. Niiniluoto argues that attacks on
 TARSKI'S LEGACY: AN INTRODUCTION xv

correspondence and on the way Tarski accounted for it are either misconceived, or
not really incompatible with Tarski's standpoint.
The rest of the book is devoted to the discussion of the approaches which share
the conviction that we cannot have anything like an explicit definition of truth -
albeit arguing for this from the opposite standpoints. Part III focuses on the
discussion of the Davidsonian claim to the substantiality of truth, whereas Part IV
focuses on the pros and cons of the detlationary view of the insubstantiality of truth.
According to Donald Davidson truth is not substantially explicable in terms of
correspondence (although to say that truth is correspondence is not so much false as
empty), but truth itself is substantial - in contrast to what is claimed both by
pragmatists like Rorty and detlationists like Horwich. In fact, Davidson claims,
"without the idea of truth we would not be thinking creatures". The reason is that
truth is so deeply interwoven with the 'infrastructure' of our language that it becomes
inextricable; for to make the crucial step from mere emitting sounds to saying
something by the sounds involves mastering this very concept. Thus truth is not only
a theoretical concept, a dispensable tool of a retlecting theoretician, it is a concept in
an important sense implicitly central to any language from the outset; a concept the
internalization of which is a presupposition of one's being a user of language (and
indeed a thinker).
A discussion of Davidson's approach to truth is also the subject ofthe next paper,
due to Jeff Malpas. Malpas highlights the difference between Rorty, for whom the
concept of truth is in essence reducible to that of justification, and Davidson, who
rejects any such reduction. Malpas' point is, again, that the concept of truth is,
according to Davidson, presupposed by any contentful language and especially by
any pointful practice of justification. Justification, as Malpas puts it, gets its point
from the concept of truth (although truth, he hastens to add, in tum gets its point
from the point it gives to justification and belief).
Manuel Garcia-Carpintero argues against the objection that disquotational truth
theories cannot, in virtue of offering a definition of truth, offer a substantial theory of
truth. The point, according to him, is that to define a 'new' concept and to offer a
theory of an 'old' one need not, contrary to appearances, always be mutually
excluding activities. In fact what we do when working towards an explication (in the
sense of Camap and Quine) is precisely defining a new concept, which is, however,
to be taken as a reconstruction of an old, obscure one; and Garcia-Carpintero argues
that this is precisely the way in which we should construe Tarski's theory.
Vladimir Svoboda considers an aspect of the Davidsonian approach to truth
which finds its expression in Davidson's claim that one's beliefs have to be
predominantly true. Svoboda argues that this claim might well be trivial, because it
follows from the 'topology' of the space of our beliefs. He points out that our
elementary beliefs form certain clusters such that at most one of the beliefs of such a
cluster can be true. (A prototypical example is constituted by the ascriptions of
colors to some particular point or thing.) Thus, as believing in any proposition from
that cluster means believing in the negations of all the other propositions of the
xvi JAROSLAV PEREGRIN

cluster, if the cluster consists of n propostions, a false belief into a proposition

belonging to it trivially brings about besides one more false belief also n-2 true ones.
The final part of the book starts with the exposition of deflationary thinking,
displayed by one of its key figures, Paul Horwich. The author sketches the basic
tenets of his deflationism, namely the "conceptual fundamentality" of the T-schema,
and shows how it necessarily extends from truth also to aboutness and reference. To
be about something is, according to the author, nothing else than to be true of it, and
to say that P is true of a is nothing else than to say that P(a) or that 'P(a), is true.
This entails that as truth is exhaustively understood once we understand the schema
'X' is true iff X, aboutness is exhaustively understood once we understand the
schemata of the kind of X refers to Y iff X = Y or X is true of Y iff xm. The author
concludes that in this way deflationism about truth-theoretic concepts undermines the
case for a relational account of meaning (and opens the door to the use theory).
The papers which follow aim at challenging deflationism, with different degrees
of forcefulness. Jerry Seligman argues that the deflationism/inflationism debate, in
effect, amounts to a 'second derivation' of the realism/anti-realism debate (arising
from it by, first, passing from the realism/anti-realism controversy to the controversy
about how to characterize this controversy, and then to the controversy how to
understand the characterization and especially the concept of truth involved in it).
But at the same time he argues that the two derivations have gone full circle and that
the deflationism/inflationism debate is in fact the original anti-realism/realism debate
in disguise, now concentrated on the truth predicate. From this he infers that despite
the claims to the contrary, deflationism presupposes a substantial philosophical
theory about truth.
Edo Pivcevic rejects deflationism as wholly miguided; for, as he claims, we
cannot make any real sense of the T-schema without trivializing it to the point where
it becomes useless, i.e. "without employing the predicate 'true' on both sides of the
biconditional, and turning it into a straightforward identity statement" . The
deflationary analysis, according to him, fails to tell us what true sentences have in
common, and therefore cannot be taken seriously as a theory of truth. And a Tarskian
underpinning of the schema via the concept of satisfaction, Pivcevic claims, does not
help much either, for in the end a Tarskian approach has to rely on circular
arguements, which instead of enhancing our understanding deepen our puzzlement
about truth.
Predrag Cicovacki rejects the deflationists attempts to denigrate truth to a
grammatical expedient on the score that they are in fact "not at all about the concept
of truth", but rather merely "about the logical behavior of the truth-predicate insofar
as it is applicable to linguistic items". He suggests that the rethinking of the concept
of truth which the deflationists attack provokes should perhaps not start from the
question what truth is?, but rather from the question why does truth matter in the
first place?
 TARSKI'S LEGACY: AN INTRODUCTION xvii

NOTES
I See esp. Tarski (1935; 1944).
2 See Frege (1918/9).
3 See esp. Russell (1914; 1918/19; 1924), Carnap (1928) and Wittgenstein (1922).
4The reason is that any such language which would contain it were bound to contain a 'Liar sentence'
which would claim, in effect, its own falsity.
5 Let us mention at least three of the best known counterexamples. Dummett (1959) points out that (I)
does not hold for sentences which lack truth value. (For suppose that a is a sentence which is neither true,
nor false, perhaps the sentence 'The present king of France is bald'; then the statement a is true, i.e. the
left-hand side of the corresponding T-sentence, is false; whereas a itself, the right-hand side of the T-
sentence, is neither true, nor false. Hence the whole T-sentence is not true.). Davidson (1967) objects that
(I) is not valid for sentences containing indexicals, like '\ am tired'. (For such sentences, Davidson
claims, (I) has to assume a form like "'\ am tired' is true as uttered by a speaker p at a time t if and only
ifp is tired at t.") Hintikka (1975) urges that there are T-sentences which are not true due to peculiarities
of certain words, such as any (as featuring, e.g., in the sentence 'Anybody can beat Chris').
6 The most questionable issue appears to be the reading of the connective 'if and only if' in (I). If we
view it through the prism of modern logic, we are inclined to read it as material equivalence; while in
natural language this connective often functions rather as a counterfactual, as something close to
'whenever' (and it is important to realize that much of the prima facie plausibility of Tarski's
considerations seems to derive from this reading of (I)}.
7 The possibility arises from the fact that this language does not possess the usual contradictory negation,
and as a consequence, its way of expressing the Liar paradox results into a sentence which is neither true,
nor false. However, Hintikka claims that this is not a trivial ad hoc amendment: his claim is that this is a
natural consequence of his conception of logic which he sees as the right logic for our reasoning and for
natural language.
8Likewise, Wittgenstein's later views may be perhaps taken to involve some version of a pragmatic view
on truth; and indeed, if we take seriously his notion of language as 'form of life' ("Sprache a1s
Lebensform", see Wittgenstein, 1953), then such a conclusion seems to be forthcoming.
9 A slight modification of this approach may be to claim that although T-sentences do characterize truth
exhaustively, they cannot count as a theory of truth, insofar as they are infinite in number. Thus what is
lacking is merely a finite capturing of the infinity of T-sentences. I think that one of the ways to read
Tarski's own work is to see him as pursuing this strategy.

REFERENCES
Blackburn, S. 1984, Spreading the Word, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Carnap, R.: 1928, Der Logische Aujbau der Welt, We\tkreis, Berlin.
Carnap, R.: 1934, Logische Syntax der Sprache, Springer, Wien.
Davidson, D.: 1967, 'Truth and Meaning', Synthese 17; reprinted in Davidson (1984), pp. 17-36.
Davidson D.: 1969, 'True to the Facts', Journal of Philosophy 66; reprinted in Davidson (1984), pp. 37-
54.
Davidson, D.: 1984, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Davidson, D.: 1990, 'The Structure and Contents of Truth', Journal of Philosophy 87, 279-328.
Davidson, D.: 1996, 'The Folly ofTrying to Define Truth', Journal of Philosophy 93,263-278.
Dummett, M.: 1959, 'Truth', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (New Series) 59; reprinted in
Dummett (1978), pp. 1-24.
Dummett, M.: 1978, Truth and other Enigmas, Duckworth, London.
xviii JAROSLA V PEREGRIN

Etchemendy, J.: 1988, 'Tarski on Truth and Logical Consequence', Journal ofSymbolic Logic 53,51-79.
Field, H.: 1972, 'Tarski's Theory ofTruth', Journal of Philosophy 69,347-375.
Frege, G.: 1918/9, 'Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung', Beitriige zur Philosophie der Deutschen
Idealismus 1, 58-77.
Hempel, e.G.: 1935, 'On the Logical Positivists Theory of Truth', Analysis 2, 49-59.
Hintikka, J.: 1975, 'A Counterexample to Tarski-Type Truth-Definition as Applied to Natural
Languages', Philosophia 5, 207-212.
Hintikka, 1.: 1991, 'Defining Truth, the Whole Truth and nothing but Truth', Reports from the
Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki; printed in J. Hintikka: Lingua Universalis vs.
Calculus Raciocinator (Selceted Papers 2), Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1997.
Hintikka, J. and Sandu, G.: 1996, 'A Revolution in Logic?', Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic 1,
169-183.
Horwich, P.: 1990, Truth, Blackwell, Oxford.
Quine, W.V.O.: 1969, Ontological RelatiVity and Other Essays, Columbia University Press, New York.
Rorty, R.: 1980, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Rorty, R.: 1991, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Philosophical Papers I), Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge.
Russell, B.: 1914, Our Knowledge of the External World, Allen and Unwin, London.
Russell, B.: 1918/19, 'The Philosophy of Logical Atomism', Monist 28/29, 495-527/32-53, 190-222,
345-380.
Russell, B.: 1924, 'Logical Atomism', in Contemporary British Philosophy: Personal Statements (First
Series), Allen & Unwin, London, pp. 356-383.
Tarski, A. 1935, 'Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen', Studia Philosophica I, 261-405
(Polish original 1933); translated as 'The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages' in
Tarski (1956), pp. 152-278.
Tarski, A: 1944, 'The Semantic Conception of Truth', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4,
341-375.
Tarski, A: 1956, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Wittgenstein, L.: 1922, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge, London; translated as Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge, London, 1961.
Wittgenstein, L.: 1953, Philosophische Untersuchungen, Blackwell, Oxford; translated as Philosophical
Investigations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1953.
 GARY KEMP

FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING *

In 'Der Gedanke', Frege argues that the supposition that truth is definable generates
a vicious regress; further, he takes the regress to cast doubt on whether the truth-
predicate can correctly be said to indicate a property at all (CP 353 IKS 344-5; cf.
PW 128-9, l3l, 142-6, 174 INS l39-40, 142-3, 154-8, 189-90).1 Clearly one can
generate a vicious regress under certain assumptions about the relation between p
and p is true. For example, we might equate true propositions with facts, and thereby
assume that the question 'What is truth?' is really the question 'What is it for an
arbitrary truth, fact or state of affairs to be realized?'; this would be as it were the
generalization of the question 'What is it for the cat to be on the mat?'. In that case,
if the realization of a state of affairs is actually analyzed as the possession, by a
proposition p, of the property truth, then we are saying, for example, that the cat's
being on the mat actually consists in a certain proposition p's having the property
truth; but then this latter proposition's being the case - that p has the property truth-
must consist in its having the property truth, and so on. This would be, as it were, the
general case of what Russell called a regress of analysis. Alternatively, though even
less cogently, we can generate what we might more loosely characterize as an
ontological or metaphysical regress. Someone might suppose that if p, then this fact
is not to be analyzed as the possession, by p, of the property truth, but that it depends
upon it. This would get the ontological dependence the wrong way: obviously in the
sequence p, p is true, p is true is true, and so on, the ontological dependence must
proceed from p to its successors, not the other way round. The cat's being on the mat
does not depend upon its being true that the cat is on the mat.
That much is clear; but it is doubtful that the question 'What is Truth?' has very
often been confused or distorted in either of these ways. For example, so long as we
do think that truth is a property of propositions, the fact that aRb is the fact that a
stands in a certain relation to b. The fact that the proposition aRb is true, however,
though implied by aRb, seems to be a different fact, which depends upon the first
fact: it is the fact that a certain proposition has a certain property, namely truth. The
reality or definability of the property truth does not seem to disturb these
observations in any way. It looks as if Frege has merely mistaken an infinite
sequence of logical implications for a vicious regress. This impression is confirmed
by Frege's also having suggested that if truth were, say, correspondence, then in
order to verify a proposition aRb one would have to check its correspondence to
reality - which would be to veritY another proposition aRb corresponds to reality,
and so on, making verification impossible. To this the obvious reply is that no reason

J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and Its Nature (ifany), 1-14.

© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 GARY KEMP

has been given why we cannot, at the first stage, simply check whether a stands in
the relation R to h.
Such is a frequent, and not unreasonable reaction to Frege's regress worries.
Nevertheless, I think that these worries do serve to locate a more forceful line of
argument. Its conclusion is the more radical one which tempts Frege in 'Der
Gedanke' but which he explicitly embraced only in unpublished notes written later:
that Truth is not a property? Its interest is certainly more general than Frege realized.
My concern, in any case, is not essentially to know Frege's mind but to articulate this
line of argument and its implications for Logic and the Theory of Meaning.

I. THE REGRESS REFORMED

Frege says that 'nothing is added' to one's judgement that p if one judges that p true;
likewise, he says, merely to utter 'p is true' is not sufficient to make an assertion (CP
354 /KS 345, PW 129, 251INS 140, 271). At one point these considerations incite
Frege to suppose that the thought that it is true that p simply collapses into the
thought that p (PW 252 INS 272). It is tempting to regard Frege here as giving an
argument which is independent of the regress argument, one which depends upon the
apparent semantic redundancy of ordinary uses of the truth-predicate. If we do so,
then it can aptly be pointed out that if the claim that 'nothing is added' to p by pis
true does not simply beg the question, then it is at most a point about ordinary usage
which does little in itself to establish either that truth is indefinable or that it is not a
genuine property of thoughts. However, I suspect that in these sorts of remarks we
should not regard Frege as attempting a separate redundancy argument, but rather as
seeking corroboration of a conceptually prior point about assertion or judgement.
Directly following the apparent redundancy argument in 'Thoughts', Frege wrote:

And yet is it not a great result when the scientist after much hesitation and
laborious researches can finally say 'My conjecture is true'? The meaning of
the word 'true' seems to be altogether sui generis. May we not be dealing
here with something which cannot be called a property in the ordinary sense
at all? (CP 354 / KS 345).

Here Frege appears to resist the conclusion that there is really no such idea as
that of truth-in-general; but despite having just denied that truth is definable, neither
is he prepared to characterize it as a simple property. He is at a loss how to
categorize it onto logically. What he does emphasize, rather, is its connection with
the idea of assertion or judgement. In coming at last to commit to a certain
judgement, the envisaged scientist acquires a certain attitude towards a certain
proposition (thought). He accepts its truth. So long as we are committed to the idea
that there are objects of judgement, then there is, indeed, no other way to
characterize what, in general, a person does in making a judgement. For if we ask,
'what do we mean by assertion or judgement?', then, given that commitment, the
question can just as well be asked as: what are we accepting about a proposition
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 3

when we accept it in that way which we designate as judgement? And the answer
seems inevitable: What we are accepting when we judge is the truth of the
proposition in question. Surely nothing else could rightly characterize what it is that
we accept about a proposition when we judge. To say that what we accept is simply
the proposition is clearly not sufficient, since surely a proposition can be accepted,
for example, merely as flattering or useful. Thus Frege maintains that to judge is
precisely to accept a thought 'as true'. Since to assert something is verbally to
manifest judgement, this means that assertoric force cannot be characterized except
by appeal to the notion of truth.
Whatever account there may be of truth must not only make this connection
explicit, it must respect its necessity. With this in mind, we can now fmd something
very different, and much more consequential, in Frege's regress argument. For
suppose we try to accommodate this connection by supposing that judgement
explicitly involves the ascription of the property truth to the thought affirmed. That
is, suppose we accept Frege's characterization of judgement as the acceptance of a
thought as true, yet we persist in the characterization of truth as a property of
thoughts. In that case, when we judge that p we ascribe truth to p. But to ascribe a
property $ to something is to judge that it is $. Hence, when we judge that p we
judge that p is true: to do the former just is to do the latter. And now a genuinely
troublesome regress really does arise. If, for variable p, to judge that p is to judge
that p is true, then to judge that p is true is to judge that fp is true] is true, and so on;
in which case, if truth is a genuine property, we should have the absurd consequence
that every judgement is really of infinite complexity. But such a regress is really only
a symptom ofthe fundamental difficulty, which is that we cannot retain both Frege's
truth-assertion connection, and the characterization of truth as a property, without
violating the distinction between sense and force. The act of grasping or entertaining
a proposition is a different act from the act of judging. Except possibly in the special
case of self-evident analytic propositions, that someone has entertained a given
proposition does not logically entail their having made a judgement whose content is
that proposition. Therefore it cannot in general be logically sufficient, in order to
make a judgement that p, that one entertain the proposition that p is true. One has to
do something else. But we have just got through saying that to do this further thing,
to judge, is to accept the proposition 'as true'. It follows that, however many
iterations of the predicate 'is true' are attached to a given proposition, one cannot
actually make a judgement without, at some point, accepting a proposition just as it
is, without adjoining the truth-predicate. That is, at some point, accepting a given
proposition 'as true' - even if the proposition does contain the truth-predicate - must
be something other than accepting that the proposition is true. If so, then there is no
reason why one cannot do this at the first stage, that is, judge that p outright. Indeed,
this must be so: One of the few certain things about the truth-predicate is what we
might call the principle of detachment, an analogue of disquotation: anyone who
fully understands the proposition 'p is true', and is in position to assert that p is true,
is also in a position to assert p. 3
Though it is doubtful that Frege ever conceived it quite so sharply, this line of
4 GARY KEMP

reasoning is surely what is responsible for one of his most pregnant aphorisms, that
the predicate 'is true' makes an 'abortive' effort to transform a notion of force into
one of content (PW 2521 NS 272). Indeed this now seems inescapable. It seems
inescapable, at any rate, if we accept Frege's characterization of judgement, and the
consequent necessity of the relation between truth and assertoric force. That is why
Frege writes that 'the thing that indicates most clearly the e~sence of logic is the
assertoric force with which a sentence is uttered'(PW 2521 NS 272). The truth-
assertion connection harmonizes this characterization with his famous
characterization oflogic as the' Laws of Truth' .4
Frege's inkling here of a confused effort embodied in a piece of grammar is one
of the many points at which we can see him as having anticipated Wittgenstein's
general diagnosis of grammar as a principal cause of metaphysical perplexity. In fact
I suspect that Wittgenstein was making, among others, precisely Frege's point about
truth and assertion in §§ 134-136 of the Philosophical Investigations. His thinking
here as ever is multiply ramified, but I think we can express his way of making this
particular point as follows. Whatever else they may be, propositions are what we
assert when we assert something. Equally, they are what the predicates of truth and
falsity can be applied to. But if truth were genuinely a property of propositions, then
this dual role of propositions would in some sense be a coincidence; it would be a
mere matter of fact that 'truth' and 'falsity' apply only to propositions, the very
things upon which we perform this all-important act of assertion. But this connection
is surely necessary, and not just in the sense of happening not to be false in any
possible world. It is, as Wittgenstein would put it, the very grammar of the notion of
a proposition that we can assert it and also say of it that it's true or that it's false.
Hence in §136:

And the use of the words 'true' and 'false' may be among the constituent
parts of this game; and if so it belongs to our concept 'proposition' but does
not 'fit' it. [Wittgenstein's emphasis]

Surely any illuminating account of truth, proposition and assertion must make this
coincidence inevitable, not just stipulate it or take it as given. To say that this
'fittingness' represents a necessary truth is merely to acknowledge this connection,
not to illuminate it or account for its necessity. Worse, it makes it look like a
remarkable metaphysical fact that either demands a substantive explanation or must
be regarded as sublimely ineffable. The implication of Frege's argument, as
Wittgenstein might have put it, is that the connection is too intimate to be a matter of
fact, of how things stand in reality - even if some things stand the way they do in
reality ofnecessity.5

2. TRUTH, PROPOSITION AND SENTENCE

How, then, can or should this intimate relationship be characterized? What sort of
positive account of Truth or the truth-predicate does it recommend? One theory
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 5

which might immediately come to mind is the perfonnative account proposed by

Strawson, whereby to say 'p is true' is to perfonn the act of asserting 'p'. But clearly
this cannot be the right way of implementing Frege's truth-assertion connection,
precisely because it violates the force/content distinction. Whereas under favourable
circumstances, a genuine perfonnative utterance such as 'I promise' is sufficient for
having promised - and thus can reasonably be regarded as making itself true - no
utterance of 'p is true', or 'I assert p', whatever the circumstances, constitutes an
assertion unless it expresses a judgement on the part of the uttering subject, a matter
which is entirely up to him 6. Furthennore, anyone who wishes to deny that the truth-
predicate denotes a property must show how we can nevertheless use the truth-
predicate in generalizations (as in metalogic or in 'Everything Socrates said is true'),
as well as use it in unasserted sentences - for example, in the unasserted antecedents
of conditionals (in fact 'p is true' can stand in wherever 'p' occurs extensionally).
Strawson's account does not itself help us to meet these requirements.
Nevertheless, Strawson's account drops a crucial hint, which we can put by
saying that the truth-predicate is best characterized by itsfunction, not by its content.
In order to substantiate this, we need to examine the interface between the Theory of
Truth with the Theory of Meaning; in tum, this will provide the motivation for the
fonnal approached endorsed in the following section. In particular, I want to explore
further the grammatical relationships that Wittgenstein alludes to at PI § 136 between
the notions of truth, proposition and assertion (though Wittgenstein does not speak
directly of assertion here). I want to try to elucidate how what Wittgenstein calls
'grammar' knits these things together.
Ramsey once made what is essentially the following point (1990, p. 39). We
know how to fill the blank of a sentence like this:

'Snow is white' is true iff ..... .

The problem of defining truth can thus be construed as the problem of filling the
blank, not for .a particular sentence like 'Snow is white' but for a (syntactical)
variable:

~ is true iff ..... .

But if the meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions, then to fill this blank is to
give the meaning of ~ for variable ~. So an innocent person might be tempted to
regard the question 'What is truth?' as equivalent to the question of what it is for a
sentence to have a particular meaning.
Now that is precisely the starting point for Davidson's approach to the concept of
meaning. Tarski's discussion of Convention T shows him to be assuming that if we
understand the concept of translation or meaning, then we know what there is to
know about truth because we can explain how to construct eliminative truth-
defmitions for particular languages. Davidson inverts this, maintaining that if we
presuppose a grasp of truth, then we can explain the concept of meaning, by
6 GARY KEMP

explaining how to construct, for any particular language, a Tarskian truth-theory

which yields the truth-conditions for each of its sentences (the construction is now
called a 'theory' because truth is now being used, not defined). The reason we need
the concept of truth is not merely that it appears in the T-sentences, taken as
antecedently understandable consequences of the theory. The more fundamental
reason is that in explaining the approach, and in applying it, we need to speak of an
arbitrary assertion.? For familiar reasons, a Davidsonian T-theory for a language can
be justified only by making the subtantive assumption that the native noise-makers
genuinely make assertions, and typically assert or are disposed to assert only what is
true. More generally, the basic empirical corroboration ofa Davidsonian T-theory is
achieved by its predicting the assertions that would be made by means of particular
sentences in particular circumstances. The notion of assertion thus figures in any
general statement of the evidence for such a theory, hence of its empirical content.
Now for Davidson, to assert is to manifest or express the attitude of holding a
sentence true. Davidson's notion of holding-true performs the role in his work that
the notion of judgement performs in Frege's or Russell's. And what we have learned
from Frege is that this relation is as it were binary rather than tetradic: it isn't a
relation between a subject, propositional object and a property, but a relation
between the first two only (of course I am ignoring the need to factor in the context
of utterance). Thus, to hold something true cannot be to hold that it is true, just as,
for Frege, accepting p as true cannot amount to accepting that p is true; 'holding-
true' is not decomposable into 'holding' and 'true'. Thus assertion has to be accepted
outright. Yet we also learned from the regress problem that the idea of truth is
already imported, once we assume the concept of assertion. The suggestion, then, is
that what Davidson's program most fundamentally presupposes is not the property
truth, but the more inclusive and general notion of assertion.
Let us consider this suggestion in more detail. As he has long argued, Davidson's
theory of interpretation implies that, since only creatures who possess the concept of
truth can be interpreters of language, only such creatures can be understanders of
language. This implication is not an easy one to accept without a great deal of
theoretical motivation, especially if the required notion of truth is something
metaphysically substantive or technically involved. Small children, and on some
level dogs, understand bits of language - do they possess the concept of truth?8 But
that source of resistance aside, Davidson's assumption of the concept of truth has
struck many otherwise sympathetic readers as imperious. 'Truth' is a mighty word,
but if an understanding of truth is what must fundamentally be presupposed by the
theory of meaning, then we might reasonably feel entitled to ask why it is the right
concept for the job. That that presupposition will enable us to construct logically
transparent and empirically answerable meaning-theories for particular languages
might at least partially justify the move, but it does not explain it. Davidson's
position shows how the methodology of radical interpretation relates Tarski's
apparatus to the concepts of belief and meaning. Such an appropriation, Davidson
has argued, thereby answers those who worry that Tarski's programme for dealing
with truth-predicates fails to illuminate those empirical connections between thought
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 7

or language and the world in which truth, ultimately, consists9 • This is an important
point about the philosophical significance of Tarski, but it does not directly address
the question of why it is truth, and not something else, that must be invoked in
connection with meaning and belief (or judgement). Frege's truth-assertion
connection can assist us here. For what I suggested in the preceding paragraph was
that, since the notion of judgement necessarily involves the notion of truth, but
cannot be analyzed, for example, into 'holding' and 'true', the interpreter's need to
assume the concept of assertion is already in some sense the need to assume the
concept of truth. (It would be incredible if the interpreter had also to appeal to a
concept of truth which is graspable in some completely different way.) That is why
the meaning of a sentence is its truth-conditions: since to judge is to accept-as-true,
the truth-conditions of a judgement can straightforwardly be identified as its content.
From this perspective, it would be a sheer category-mistake to characterize meaning
in terms of conditions of warrant of suchlike; that would merely conflate the content
of what is said with its justification (this position does not, however, amount to an
assertion of realism; it weighs against Dummettian anti-realism, but, equally, casts
doubt upon the intelligibility of any recognisable doctrine which might be called
'Realism').
The point might be put more strongly by saying that no member of the triad
assertion, truth, and proposition can be understood independently of the others,
hence that it is ultimately unintelligible to try to explain the notion of proposition -
what Frege called a 'judgeable content' - as anything other than that which admits of
truth and falsity. (Analogously, you know what the king is in chess only if you
understand what it is for the king to be in check.) We need truth in order to convey
the general idea of a proposition, which the Tractarian Wittgenstein tried to
formulate as This is how things are. Many variants are available, such as That's true,
This is how it is, Such-and-such is the case, This is the situation, It is thus, etc., only
some of which involve the word 'true'. I suspect Frege glimpsed this at least
fleetingly:

All the same it is something worth thinking about that we cannot recognize a
property of a thing without at the same time finding the thought this thing has
this property to be true. So with every property of a thing there is tied up a
property of a thought, namely truth. (CP 3541 KS 345)

Yet this immediately precedes a denial that truth is really a property of thoughts.
Reading somewhat willfully perhaps, I think that Frege's hint in this last sentence is
that truth can be characterized as the general idea of what is common to the
judgement-forms this thing has this property, this stands in this relation to that, etc.
If we could only complete the list, then the truth-predicate really would be
dispensable. It is not completable, yet it seems we do understand how to go on with
it. What we grasp, then, is what Wittgenstein described as the general form of a
proposition or judgeable content - the idea of propositional unity, the general notion
of something thought or judged.
8 GARY KEMP

Now this notion is certainly intrinsic to the notion of assertion, even more
conspicuously than the notion of truth. Every assertion must have a particular
content. Indeed, it is precisely when we make the attempt to characterize the concept
of assertion or judgement in general that it seems to divide into two components -
the content, and the attitude that the content is true. If you had to explain the concept
of assertion to a child (without giving examples), you would say something like, 'It's
when you say that something is true', or 'It's when you say that something is so'.
The upshot of Frege's regress problem is that no such analysis really makes sense,
not in the literal way that the grammar of those explanations imply. It is equally
important to appreciate what happens when we try to isolate the notion of
proposition for individual treatment. Ifwe ask, What kind of thing is a proposition?,
then one kind of answer, suggestive as well as useful in its way, is to say that a
proposition is a kind of model or picture composed of such-and-such elements. But
this cannot literally be correct; these models or pictures are crucially different from
ordinary pictures or models. To speak of the fidelity of a representation such as a
picture or model is always relative to some chosen criterion, some chosen relation or
'rule of projection' between representation and subject such as subjective visual
similarity. The relation of the proposition to reality, however - the relation in virtue
of which it counts as matching or not matching - is a necessary one; given the
proposition, there cannot be a further question of which rule is to count as the truth-
determining rule of projection. Such is a way of specially applying Frege's regress
argument to a correspondence or picturing account of truth (it is also a reason why
the sentences of the Tractatus are by their own account meaningless: logical form
cannot be depicted). Now this is at once a way of saying that their determinability as
true or false - perhaps modulo certain provisos concerning vagueness and reference-
failure - are necessary or intrinsic features of propositions. We cannot literally speak
of a 'rule of projection' from proposition to reality, because if there were such a rule
it would have to be internal to the proposition itself, in which case the point of the
rule as a particular interface between proposition and reality would be lost. That a
proposition is the sort of thing that can be true is not the same sort of fact as the fact,
for example, that a given set of marks on paper is capable of depicting a tune.
Thus we have the notion of truth if we have the notion of proposition. To close
up the assertion-truth-proposition circle, then, we have only to accept that assertoric
force is uniquely essential to the notion of proposition. To characterize a proposition
as the content of a possible judgement (or assertion), as Frege does, must be given
pride of place because it is uniquely the notion of judgement - accepting-as-true -
that engages immediately with the notion of truth; hence an explanation of any other
sentential speech-act or variety of force must assume the notion of truth, and thereby
the notion of the correctness of a judgement. (There could not be 'models' or
'pictures' without the thought of their being correct or incorrect.) Thus if a
proposition is most fundamentally the content of a possible judgement, to judge is to
accept a proposition as true, and the role of 'That's true' is to stand proxy for an
arbitrary proposition, then we might begin to feel that the circle has been knitted up
tightly enough.
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 9

This is not to say that any other notion is positively to displace the concept of
truth; none is to be taken as primitive or as able to define truth. In Davidson's view
the balance clearly tips towards taking truth as primitive, even ifhe does not propose
precisely to define the notion of proposition or meaning in terms of it. What I
suggest, for the moment, is something more like mutual dependence,
interpenetration. If Davidson inverts Tarski's plan of relying on Meaning to explain
Truth, then the real, purpose-neutral order of things is so to speak horizontal; neither
strategy has absolute explanatory priority 10. What is more accurately described as
fundamental - and what Davidson's strategy fundamentally presupposes - is that
which encompasses the notions of Meaning and Truth, the notion of assertion or
judgement. Again, this is not to insist merely on necessary relations between certain
concepts, as if in principle they were separately conceivable and we had now to map
their connections; it is to say that the general notions of truth and propositional
content are already given by the notion of judgement, yet cannot be appealed to in
advance for the purpose of analysing it.

3. LOGICAL SYNTAX

What formal device, consistently with these reflections concerning truth, can perform
the roles for which a truth-predicate seems to be needed? For familiar reasons, I shall
assume that the relevant formal problem here is to shed light upon the non-deviant
ascription of truth within a given language: that, in particular, the
language/metalanguage distinction, though demonstrably forced upon us for some
purposes, is not a feature of our intuitive understanding of truth; it is not itself part of
the data which we set out to model. Whereas, for example, consistent but irreducible
truth-ascribing generalizations within a language do exist; we may thus assume that
an account of truth which fails to vindicate them thereby fails to capture a genuine
aspect of our understanding of truth (which is not to say, of course, that all such
aspects can consistently be reconciled).
One might thus look immediately to Kripke's well-known approach to truth
(Kripke 1975). For not only does Kripke's discussion show how to defme a truth-
predicate for a language L which operates within L itself; the intuition upon which
the approach is based can plausibly be explicated in terms of the functional
characterization of the truth-predicate described in the preceding section. The idea is
that the truth-values of sentences containing truth-predicates should not necessarily
be fixed except by those of sentences not containing them. If the truth-value of a
truth-predicate-containing sentence is not so fixed, then it needn't receive a truth-
value (hence for example 'x is true' gets a truth-value if x does, but needn't
otherwise). Accordingly, the truth-values of sentences in which the truth-predicate
occurs are fixed inductively, by setting up a cumulative hierarchy of interpretations
of the predicate: at level-D, sentences not containing the predicate are interpreted in
the normal way; this sets the stage for the truth-evaluation of sentences containing
one occurrence of the predicate; which sets the stage for the truth-evaluation of
sentences containing two occurrences of the predicate, and so on. A sentence whose
10 GARY KEMP

truth-value is not fixed at any level is said to be ungrounded (these include

paradoxical sentences). The reason this approach is congenial to the functional
characterization of truth is that if the truth-predicate is really a device for displaced
assertion and the like, then what we should require is precisely that a non-deviant use
of the truth-predicate always aims ultimately to acquire a truth-value from a sentence
not containing a truth-predicate. If for example an assertoric use fails to connect with
such a sentence, then no assertion is made, hence no truth-value should be
determined. By showing how the extension of the truth-predicate can be fixed by the
extralinguistic facts ll , Kripke's construction might seem to achieve this, so long as
we insist, in a Strawsonian spirit, that being grounded rather than ungrounded is a
presupposition of any attempt at assertion.
However, aside from its abandonment of bivalence, and consequent inability to
cope with the strengthened Liar Paradox, the appeal to Kripke's construction fails to
accord with our previous discussion in the right wayl2. One reason is that if Truth is
dealt with literally by means of a predicate, then the denial that Truth is a property
will require some metaphysical account of properties whereby not all logical
predicates denote properties (thus far we have employed the term 'property' in a
merely informal way). Another is that Kripke's construction counts as fully
grammatical the attribution of truth to non-propositional objects (nonsentences get
the value false in Kripke's scheme); our discussion should make us uneasy about
that. There is also a subtler reason, which is I think more fundamental. Kripke's
construction is compatible with the supposition that the notion of truth is something
superadded to language in general, as if the truth-predicate were simply a device
which, unfortunately for a pure redundancy theory of truth, is required for certain
special but legitimate purposes like model theory, epistemology, or promising not to
lie. Indeed Horwich's deflationism is precisely an attempt to maintain something of
the redundancy view while allowing for the generalizations required for such
purposes: the concept of truth, according to Horwich, is nothing but the role of the
truth-predicate in forming those generalizations. Aside from those generalizations it
has no essential role or significance. I think that Davidson, and Frege and
Wittgenstein in their less conspicuous ways, are right to insist that its role is far more
fundamental than that, that it cannot happily be thOUght of as entering into language
at any such later stage. The notion of truth is inseparable from the very idea of saying
something. An ideally satisfactory formal treatment would not only reflect this but
afford some kind of insight into it; it ought to afford insight into Truth, not merely
accommodate the word for it.
And in fact there is such a theory: it is the Prosentential Theory, due to Grover,
Belnap and Camp (Grover et al. 1975), and ably defended on numerous points of
detail by Grover. Its authors, indeed, explicitly claim inspiration from § 136 of the
Philosophical Investigations, though they do not, as I do, claim to have found there
an argument which supports it (perhaps because I am reading Frege's argument into
the passage). One aspect of the assertion-truth-proposition pyramid which emerged
from Wittgenstein and Frege's discussions was that a sentence like 'that's true'
stands proxy for an arbitrary proposition. The Prosentential Theory takes this point
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 11

quite straightforwardly. It is a syntactical proposal which explains the use of 'true' in

terms of propositional quantification. On this view, the open sentence 'that is true'
(or 'it is true', 'x is true', etc.), in its basic uses, should be viewed as semantically
unstructured. It serves as a genuine sentence-variable, just as 'it' and 'is thus and so'
can serve as object and predicate variables. It is not an objectual variable whose
substituends are names of propositions or sentences; it is not a mere schematic
sentence-letter as in standard propositional logic, and it need not be regarded merely
as a substitutional variable (in fact I think it would be wrong to do so) 13. If one
regards sentences as referring to truth-values, then they may be understood as
variables whose values are truth-values, but their most fundamental characterization
should be as a variable expression, not as a variable referring device. Used
anaphorically, then, a pro sentence imports the content of its antecedent, not merely
its reference (if any); this of course will be a proposition, the content of a sentence.
As a bound variable, it expresses an arbitrary proposition. Thus for example if we
write such a prosentence as 'thatt', then in a reformulated English we could, instead
of saying 'Every proposition is either true or false', say 'For all thatt, either thatt or
not-thatt'. The explanation for the grammatical appearance of the words 'is true' as a
predicate of ordinary language is twofold: First, without a subject and predicate,
prosentences won't look or feel like sentences, in the way that pronouns look and
feel like nouns; they won't exemplify the structure of what they go proxy for. It
doesn't feel like an assertion unless you have a subject and verb. But that is a mere
psychological fact, with no implications for logic (and even there we sometimes
relax our attitude, saying such things as, 'Well, if so, then ... ', and 'If the former,
then ... '). Second, the grammatical decomposability of 'It is true' and the like
facilitates tensed and otherwise contextually relativised attributions of truth - 'that
was true', etc.; it also facilitates the demarcation of the scopes of generalizations and
the indication of the intended anaphoric antecedents, as in 'He disagrees with
everything Kemp said today, but some of it was true'. (Again, this feature does not
require the assignment of a semantic value to the truth-predicate itself; its role is only
to form prosentences, whose function is characterized independently.) This view
seems to make for the closest possible alliance with the truth-proposition-assertion
connections discussed above, because the open sentence 'x is true' is now being
construed as a variable declarative sentence. It functions precisely by standing in for
an arbitrary judgeable content; it represents the general form of a proposition, if you
like, just as an objectual variable might be said to represent the general form of an
object.
The Prosentential Theory has been felt to be artificial. Graeme Forbes, for
example, describes it as hard to believe, and suggests that it cannot be explained in
the metalanguage without leaning upon the concept of truth, that is, without
presupposing truth as a genuine predicate (Forbes 1986). But we have an explanation
of why the theory should seem artificial. And if it is true that we cannot explain the
theory without employing a truth-predicate - cannot, in particular, interpret
quantifiers binding prosentences without using one - then that in itself is no
argument against the Prosentential Theory. For if the Prosentential Theory is true,
12 GARY KEMP

then 'it is true' and its relatives, in the metalanguage, already are prosentences.

4. CONCLUSION; HISTORICAL NOTE

My conclusion is that Frege was right to worry about truth in the way that he did, and
to have been tempted by the arguments and conclusions that he was. Although he did
not know what to make of it, he had in his hands, or stumbled upon, a line of thought
concerning truth whose cogency surely matches that of the more widely recognized
views. Probably it is not accidental that aspects of it appear not only in the sections
of the Philosophical Investigations discussed earlier but also at various places in the
Tractatus - composed in its final form during Wittgenstein's service in the Great
War and during its aftermath but, in many of its logical aspects, largely thought
through by the end of 1914 (the 'Notes to Moore'). Of course 'Der Gedanke' was
composed slightly later, but the crucial considerations are at least implicit in Frege's
philosophical discussions from the 1890s. From no later than 1891 he characterized
judgement as the inward acceptance of a thought as true (no wonder, then, Tractatus
4.442: 'it is quite impossible for a proposition to say of itself that it is true'). This is
all that is needed for the subsequent formulations that 'the idea of truth is bound up
with any predication whatsoever', and that 'true' seems to allow 'what corresponds
to the assertoric force to assume the form of a contribution to the thought [italics
added]'(PW 177,233,2521 NS 192,251,272). We will never know what Frege and
Wittgenstein said to each other during the young Wittgenstein's visits to Frege
during his pre-war intervals away from Cambridge (except what maybe inferred from
such remarks of Wittgenstein's as that Frege 'quite wiped the floor with me' on the
first of those visits) but I suspect that here is part of the deep common ground that
shows Wittgenstein to be the apostle of Frege rather than of Russell. For it is an
aspect of nothing less than the difference between a judgement-based and a thing-
based metaphysics - between a metaphysics which begins with objects and attempts
to explain thought and meaning on their basis, and one which, consistently with
Kant's dictum of the spontaneity of thought, regards the unity of judgement as
irrecoverable after analysis.

University ofWaikato

NOTES

• Ancestors of this paper were read at the Prague International Logic Colloquium, 19 September 1996,
The University of Glasgow, 10 February 1997, The University of Sheffield, 12 February 1997, and the
Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in Berkeley, 28 March 1997. For comments
and other instruction I especially thank David Bell, Dorothy Grover, Peter Hylton, Terry Parsons, Dave
Truncellito, and Nick Zangwill.
I CP is Frege 1984; PW is Frege 1979; KS is Frege 1967; NS is Frege 1969.

2 It is probably worth pointing out that it would be misleading at best to say, 'Of course Frege didn't
 FREGE: ASSERTION, TRUTH AND MEANING 13

think that Truth is a property; he held it to be an object, namely the denotation of a true sentence'. That
true sentences denote the True does not itselftell us anything about the meaning of truth predicates. At
most this fact enables Frege to define a predicate of sentences which will have the expected properties, so
long as semantical concepts of some sort are available. We can write, for example, 's is true iff the
denotation of s = the True', or, substituting an arbitrary logical truth T for 'The True', 's is true iff the
denotation of s = T. This fact shows that Frege would have to swallow one of two things: (1) Though
formally adequate - ignoring inconsistency - no such truth-predicate could provide a genuine definition
or analysis of truth; (2) Neither the notion of denotation nor the analogous relation between items of
sense and items of denotation is any more real than Truth (see Ricketts 1986, Kemp 1995). It might also
be pointed out that Frege's horizontal is not a truth-predicate. Attached to sentences it is truth-
functionally identical to double-negation, and it yields the value False when attached to names which are
not sentences, such as names of propositions or names of sentences.

3 Of course I am assuming that one fully understands 'p is true' only if one fully understands p. See 'The
Thought' but also 'My Basic Logical Insights', PW 2511NS 271.

4 For more on this, especially on the role that Frege's outlook on truth plays in his philosophical
conception oflogic, see Kemp (1995).
5 This is, of course, precisely the sort criticism that Wittgenstein, early and late, made of both Frege's and
Russell's accounts of logic and mathematics: The idea that logical and mathematical truths are as they
are because of the properties and relations borne by logical and mathematical objects simply cannot do
justice to their necessity or a priori status.
6 For this reason I think the otherwise congenial and illuminating account given by David Bell of Frege's
assertion sign must be incorrect. See Bell (\ 979) p. 98.

7 It's worth noting that the concept of assertion would be required even if sentence-meaning were
explicated in terms of conditions of use or warranted assertion rather than truth-conditions.
8 Whereas it is not incredible to suppose that, in the most rudimentary way, dogs do appreciate the
peculiarity of assertion - what is happening when someone says something to them. It is important here
not to think of 'understanding' and the like as all-or-nothing.
9 See 'The Structure and Content of Truth' .
10 In 'The Structure and Content of Truth' - in my view Davidson's best and most profound statement of
his position - Davidson comes close to abandoning the priority thesis. The essay begins as an attempt to
add the empirical content needed to convert Tarski's formal apparatus into a general account of truth.
However, at a crucial point (p. 314) Davidson clearly reverts to his longstanding strategy of regarding
Truth as undefinable in order not to assume the concepts of belief, meaning, intention and the like in the
description of the evidence for a Truth-Theory. My suggestion is that, although it is theoretically
illuminating to discuss what can be done by assuming one priority of concepts rather than another, there
is no purpose-neutral priority here. It is equally legitimate to rely on meaning to illuminate truth (it
should go without saying that by 'illumination' we cannot mean 'definition' or 'reduction').

II Consistency doesn't require that it be fixed only in that way, but for our purposes no other
interpretation of the truth-predicate would be of any relevance.

12 Various attempts have been made to enable a groundedness-based truth-theory to cope with the
strengthened liar, but the price has been precisely the sort of burgeoning complexity which sceptics will
say lacks cogent motivation aside from the need to avoid paradox. See Grover (1980) §7.4 and Grover
(1976) for an argument that the strengthened liar actually shows that 'is true' is not a logical predicate.
13 See Grover, 'Propositional Quantifiers'. Note that propositional quantification in Grover's sense does
not assume the existence of propositions, if by 'existence' we mean being the value of a first-order
variable; that is precisely why it is propositional quantification, not simply objectual quantification over
14 GARY KEMP

a domain restricted to those objects which happen to be propositions.

REFERENCES
Bell, David: 1979, Frege's Theory ofJudgement, Oxford, Clarendon.
Davidson, Donald: 1984, 'Radical Interpretation', in D. Davidson, Inquiries Into Truth and
Interpretation, Oxford, Clarendon.
Davidson, Donald: 1990, 'The Structure and Content of Truth', The Journal of Philosophy LXXXVII,
279-328.
Forbes, Graham: 1986, 'Truth, Correspondence and Redundancy' in G. Macdonald and G. Wright (eds.):
Fact, Science and Morality: Essays on A. J. Ayer's 'Language, Truth and Logic', Oxford,
Blackwell, pp. 27-54.
Frege, Gottlob: 1967, Kleine Schriften (KS), Hildesheim, George Olms.
Frege, Gottlob: 1969, Nachgelassene Schriften (NS), Hamburg, Felix Meiner.
Frege, Gottlob: 1979, Posthumous Writings (PW), Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Frege, Gottlob: 1984, Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic and Philosophy (CP), Oxford, Blackwell.
Grover, Dorothy: 1992, 'Propositional Quantifiers', Journal of Philosophical Logic 1, 111-136.
Grover, Dorothy L., Camp, Joseph L. Jr. and Belnap, Nuel D. Jr., 1975, 'A Prosentential Theory of
Truth', Philosophical Studies 27,73-125.
Horwich, Paul: 1990, Truth, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.
Kemp, Gary: 1995, 'Truth in Frege's "Laws of Truth"" Synthese 105,31-51.
Kripke, Saul: 1975, 'Outline ofa Theory of Truth', Journal of Philosophy 72, 690-716.
Ramsey, Frank: 1990, 'Facts and Propositions', in Frank Ramsey, Philosophical Papers, D.H. Mellor
(ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Ricketts, Thomas: 1986, 'Generality, Meaning and Sense in Frege', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 67,
172-195.
Strawson, Peter: 1949, 'Truth', AnalYSis 9, 83-97.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig: 1961, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (tr.),
London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig: 1958, Philosophical Investigations, E. Anscombe (tr.), Oxford, Blackwell.
 AW.CARUS

CARNAP, SYNTAX, AND TRUTH*

... this is again only a practical question of language

engineering, and therefore ought to be solved
according to such practical points of view as
convenience and simplicity.
- from Carnap 's reply to Davidson (Schilpp 1963)

Tarski's definition of truth had a major impact on analytic philosophy. It

unquestionably had a major impact on Camap. It helped motivate his shift, in the
mid-1930's, from pure syntax to the incorporation of semantics (and then
pragmatics) into his overall view of scientific language. But it is sometimes said (e.g.
by Coffal) that this change of Camap's, from pure syntax to a broader view
including semantics, involved the abandonment of a coherence theory of truth, and
the acceptance of a correspondence theory. Along with this comes the accusation -
levelled, for instance, by Rusself - that the supposed coherence theory of the syntax
phase led Camap to give up an empiricist criterion of meaning.
Three questions, then, may be asked about this:

1) Did Camap maintain a coherence theory of truth during the syntax period
(1932-5)?

2) Whether he did or not, had he, during this period, given up an empirical (or
empiricist) criterion of meaning (as Russell and Coffa claim)?

3) Did he change his mind, and switch to a correspondence theory of truth after
1935, when he incorporated semantics into his proposed language of science?

To answer these questions, a brief outline will first be sketched of Camap's view
during the syntax period. Then his motives for accepting semantics in 1935 will be
discussed. Then, to make Camap's view of these matters clearer, the next section
contrasts his views with more recent philosophical conceptions of truth. Finally, it
will be seen that, once that viewpoint is sufficiently clear, all three of the above
questions - insofar as they still seem relevant - have obvious (negative) answers.

15
J Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), 15-35.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
16 A.W.CARUS

I. OUTLINE OF THE SYNTAX DOCTRINE

In about 1932 Carnap broke with a basic tenet of the philosophical framework he
had inherited from Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein - a tenet he had
himself endorsed in Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Scheinprobleme in der
Philosophie, and various articles culminating in the famous "Die physikalische
Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft" (later published as a booklet in
English entitled Unity of Science). These works had established Camap as a leader
of a movement that was known then (and is still sometimes called) "logical
positivism", whose doctrines were first made known to English-language readers
through the distorting lens of Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (Ayer, 1946).
The basic tenet of analytic philosophy that Carnap departed from in 1932 was the
idea that there is a true logic, or that logic is somehow given, that truths of logic are
ineluctable matters of fact about the way something (about the world or about our
way of seeing it) is. That (in short) there was one uniquely correct logic. Even that
would not have been quite the right way to put it, before 1932; one couldn't speak of
"a" logic, as if there were alternatives. There was just logic3.
Carnap's 1932 departure from this view went by the name "logical syntax".
Curiously, it is missing from Ayer's book4, as from most other accounts of the
Vienna Circle5 • This omission, and responses like those of Coffa and Russell cited
above, suggest that the deep transformation initiated by Camap around 1932 never
was assimilated in the larger philosophical community at the time, and is only now
being "re" -discovered by a new generation of historically-minded analytic
philosophers6 • Though announced in glowingly radical terms 7 , the idea was
expounded in a largely technical vein, beyond the reach of all but a tiny proportion
of readers in the 1930's and 40's. In any case, it seemed to many (as it still seemed to
Coffa) that the syntax view could be ignored - since it had been "overcome" - once
Carnap incorporated semantics in 1935.
In fact, the departure initiated in 1932 remained basic to Camap's philosophy for
the rest of his careers. What was that departure? The fundamental and revolutionary
aspect of it (and the one Camap stuck with) is the doctrine of logical pluralism
summed up in the famous "principle of tolerance" enunciated in 1934 (in § 17 of the
Logical Syntax) as follows:

It is not our business to set up prohibitions, but to arrive at conventions ... In

logic, there are no morals. Everyone should set up his logic, i.e. his form of
language, as he wants. But if he wants to discuss it with us, he should make
clear how he wants to do it, and give syntactic specifications rather than
philosophical rambling. (Camap, 1934c, pp. 44-5; my translation)

This doctrine of logical pluralism is nothing more than just the denial that there
is, in the nature of things, a single true or correct logic. We have to accept, Camap
says, that there is no "fact of the matter" about logic - that intuitionists and
formalists disagree not about anything "out there" but only about the right language
 CARNAP, SYNTAX AND TRUTH 17

to use as a general framework for science. We should therefore treat their positions
not as assertions about some language-transcendent reality but as proposals for the
best way to set up our language9 • This approach applies, for Carnap, not just to logic
itself, strictly defined, but to many other issues in the logic of science viewed more
broadly. Thus, for instance, the central issue of what to count as empirical evidence
cannot itself be determined by empirical evidence but must, rather, be stipulated by
the rules for setting up the scientific language (Camap, 1932c, 1936a). Thus the very
concept of "empirical evidence", so often taken for granted by past empiricisms,
becomes language-relative, and Camap explicitly allowed that different proposals for
defining this concept might have merit and be worth developing (Camap, 1932c).
A brief summary cannot hope to do justice to the far-reaching implications of this
idea. Views traditionally thought of as metaphysical, for instance, can more usefully
and fruitfully, according to the post-1932 Camap, be viewed as proposals for the
scientific language. Thus phenomenalism (idealism) and physicalism (realism) are
best viewed as proposals for the definition of empirical evidence within the language
of science; phenomenalism proposes that all empirical statements should be
reducible (Aujbau-like) to statements about subjective sensory experiences, while
physicalism is the proposal that we accept the everyday "thing language" - the
realistic language of ordinary physical objects and their qualities - as sufficient.
In this view, the traditional conception of "the truth" as the end of inquiry was
not abandoned or displaced, but it became at least partly language-relative. It could
no longer be conceived as a language-transcending attempt to discover the way
things ultimately are, in the way it had been conceived by Aristotle, Descartes, Kant,
Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein.
The place of this "search for the truth" (as the object of philosophical activity)
was taken, for Carnap, by the project of explication lO • By this he meant the step-by-
step remodelling or reconstruction of our natural-language concepts (the explicanda
or things to be explicated) and their replacement by better ones (the explicata) -
where "better" means: more consistent, more powerful, more sharply and
unambiguously defined, and thus more useful, in the long run, for our common
human purposes ll . With time, the explicata diffuse into common practices and
schooling, and thus into everyday language; our medium of common, everyday, civic
and scientific communication becomes progressively clearer and richer.
One is reminded, perhaps, of the ongoing bricolage on Neurath's boat, endorsed
by Quine. But Carnap's vision is a quite different one. He does not think of ordinary
language as a monolithic "conceptual scheme" in which all of science and
mathematics are embedded inextricably and continuously. Ordinary language is not
really a conceptual framework at all, for Camap; it is too vague and unmanageable
for that. Its vagueness is pragmatically necessary - the instrument of everyday,
situated communication can't be expected to supply ready-made, clear, unambiguous
concepts. (That is true even in ordinary scientific language, the language of inter-
scientific communication, of teaching, conferences, and casual scientific
conversation). The explicata must often be imported from outside, generally from
among the more exact concepts developed in particular sciences.
IS A.W.CARUS

The conceptual framework in which we operate - the language we adopt in our

inquiries - is one we have control over, for Camap; we needn't "acquiesce" in
anything we haven't ourselves laid down l2 if it turns out later that its inconveniences
outweigh its benefits. By the same token, there is no more to the "conceptual
scheme" - the framework we lay down - than what we have put into it. Of course
there may be complications: a set of axioms or a concept long used may tum up
paradoxes, or tum out to be incomplete. These are unforeseen costs - which we are
likely to incur with any kind of tool when we push it beyond the application it was
originally designed for. But we are free then to decide whether to continue using that
tool, or to patch it, or to replace it. There are no unruly concepts lurking in the
shadows.
Thus Camap's figure would not have been that of a self-sufficient boat on the
open sea. It would not, in fact, have been an ocean metaphor at all, but rather a social
one, indeed an urban one, like Wittgenstein's figure of the ragged old city with its
orderly modem suburbs (Wittgenstein, 1953, Part I, §IS). Except that in Camap's
version, the city would be one (like real cities) in which the old city center renews
itself, rebuilds itself, imports technologies and appliances from the modem suburbs
(the scientific and orderly parts of language). Though we may often choose to retain
the old exteriors, we remodel and re-engineer the substance of our buildings to turn
them into the kinds of places we want to inhabit, complete with all modem
conveniences.
Explication is this process of re-fashioning, or re-engineering. It is an operation
that takes place outside any conceptual framework. It is not internal to natural
language - which (as we saw) is not a conceptual framework, but rather a vague
means of everyday interaction, optimized for species survival like other animal
languages, only vastly more sophisticated and susceptible to the imposition of
elaborate structures 13. That makes it suitable as a crude, makeshift common
metalanguage for (among other things) talking about - specifying, comparing,
discussing - more precisely specified proposals for a better common language of
science l4 . The activity of thus specifying, comparing, discussing, however, also
stands outside any of these proposals. Internal neither to ordinary language (which
isn't precise enough to have a clear "inside" or "outside") nor to precisely specified
formal frameworks (which it is about and thus external to), this activity was called
pragmatic by Camap, the systematic addressing of external questions - the realm not
of cognitive or empirical significance but of proposals for languages.
Natural language has no more fundamental significance, for Camap, than this. It
cannot itself be either a starting-point or a guide in the process of explication, except
insofar as its resources permit the rough and ready, pre-systematic clarification of an
explicandum. In renovating our old houses, we accept the principles of modem
plumbing and electrical engineering; however well past generations may have built
and lived without such amenities, we do not seek to enter into their intuitions when
pulling fiber-optic cables through new ducts behind ancient masonry. The languages
of the special sciences are, for Camap, the best sources of explications for the vague
terms of natural language. And if it should happen that one of these scientific
 CARNAP, SYNTAX AND TRUTH 19

languages requires a new concept that has no counterpart in natural language, then
the process of explication must proceed without regard for that gap; an explicatum
needn't have a corresponding explicandum (there needn't be a medieval counterpart
to fiber-optic cable)15. The concept of "cholesterol", for instance, has no counterpart
in natural language, but was introduced by scientists in the course of the
development of biochemical knowledge; meanwhile it has become a relatively
established part of everyday language l6 .
This completes the brief survey of the linguistic pluralism to which Camap
converted in about 1932 17 . I began by calling this pluralism the "fundamental and
revolutionary" aspect of Camap's so-called "syntax" revolution of the early 1930's.
But the more high-profile "syntax" aspect - which after all gave its name to the
whole project - can't be omitted entirely. This was the idea that the whole of logic
and mathematics, the mathematical or deductive part of science, and the entire meta-
theory of science (what was left of philosophy, insofar as it wasn't nonsense) could
be made entirely formal, i.e. syntactic. It could be freed entirely from any form of
reference or meaning, from any connection to anything non-linguistic. All statements
expressed in the "material mode of speech" (purporting to refer to extra-linguistic
entities) should therefore either be translatable into the formal mode of speech or
dispensed with - all statements, that is, except "object sentences" or sentences about
physical things, including both "protocol sentences" (particular reports of evidence
for more general statements) and empirical generalizations, which, in the syntax
view, were truth-functional combinations of protocol sentences. "Pseudo-object
sentences" - those which appeared to be referring to physical objects (i.e. statements
in the material mode of speech) but were really either syntactical or nonsensical -
could be tolerated as long as a translation into the formal mode of speech was known
to be available. "Five is a number, not an object", for instance, was acceptable since
it could be translated into '''five' is a number-word, not a thing-word" (Camap,
1934c, p. 212, pp. 239-43).
How does this extreme formalism, then, fit with the linguistic pluralism
expounded above? The answer is that it doesn't. In Carnap's mind at the time, the
two doctrines were indissolubly linked. Commentators have taken Carnap too much
at his word. In fact, the two ideas are quite separate even in their origins. The story is
too long to tell here; a few words will suffice. The syntax part came to Camap "like a
vision" during a sleepless night in January 1931 18 . But this idea was actually an
attempt to resurrect Camap's original Fregean dream of a single true logic; it
followed several other such attempts l9 , from which it differed primarily in taking
Hilbert's programme as its starting point (and envisioning a kind of extension of that
programme to the whole of philosophy). Not surprisingly, Camap gave up this
attempt within a year or two of the January 1931 "vision". But when he presented his
new idea to the Vienna Circle in June 1931, he emphasized that all sentences,
however different, had to be in a single language (the one that survived as Language
I ofthe final Syntax)20.
It was only sometime in 1932 that Camap gave up the idea of correctness in logic
altogether and embraced (or resigned himself to) tolerance instead. Readers of the
20 A.W. CARUS

Logical Syntax of Language will be aware, however, that this is not how Carnap
presents matters in those pages. We find, rather, that syntactic formalism and
linguistic pluralism are fused together and presented as a single doctrine. It was of
course no longer a syntactic formalism based on the idea of a single universal
language - Language I has become, in the book, one possibility among an infinity of
others. But the insistence on the "formal mode of speech" remains - indeed the
elimination of philosophical pseudo-problems through the replacement of material
by formal expressions is the main theme of the book's final chapter (the only part
that was widely read).
It was only this extreme formalism, not tolerance or pluralism - certainly not the
whole "syntax program", if that is understood to embrace both ofthese doctrines! -
that Carnap gave up with the acceptance of semantics in 1935. We now turn our
attention to the motivation for that step.

II. WHY INCORPORATE SEMANTICS?

If (as is now generally agreed among commentators)21 the acceptance of semantics

was not a fundamental discontinuity in Carnap's development, why did he make such
an issue of this step, and why was it such a controversial and divisive question within
the Vienna Circle (Carnap, 1963, pp. 60-61)? No doubt these two questions have
somewhat different answers. To Carnap himself, at any rate, as he made plain at the
time 22 , it was very much a matter of what he called "language engineering". The task
was to find an explication for "true" and related semantical concepts that avoided
paradoxes and metaphysical implications while minimizing violation of the everyday
(including everyday scientific) use of these terms.
Before 1935 the Vienna Circle had thought of "true" mainly as something to be
avoided, or "eliminated" by using a syntactic replacement, such as "provable in Ln";
the unrestricted use of "true" notoriously led to paradoxes (Carnap, 1934c, 1935b).
Less suspect, to most members of the Vienna Circle (though Carnap himself never
took to it), was the use of "true" in an empirical sense, to mean something like
"empirically certain" or "conclusively verified" (cf. Creath, 1991, pp. 410-11). But
this, like the problem of the semantic paradoxes, was really just another reason to
avoid the term, since empirical confirmation is always provisional and incomplete;
no empirical statement could ever be called "true". In violation of everyday and
scientific usage, then, truth in this empirical sense had to be a matter of degree,
which also meant sacrificing the law of excluded middle. For Reichenbach, these
were acceptable costs (even after Tarski's semantic definition of truth); for Carnap
they were an embarrassment, and acceptable only so long as there was no palatable
alternative.
When Tarski provided that alternative - a purely logical one, removing truth
entirely from the realm of confirmation and induction - Carnap required no
convincing. At the 1935 Paris conference he advocated a clear separation between
truth and confirmation, to the dismay of many, especially Neurath. At another
meeting in Paris two years later, in July 1937, Carnap made a strenuous effort to
 CARNAP, SYNTAX AND TRUTH 21

bring Neurath round. In the notes prepared for that meeting, he spells out his reasons
for dissatisfaction with the explication of true as "confirmed" or "accepted" (which
Neurath saw as a "syntactic elimination" of the truth-predicate). That explication
would require, Carnap says, that "true" be time-dependent (since the truth of a
sentence would depend on its being known). Thus for instance we would have to
regard as synonymous these two statements: (A) '''Goethe died in Weimar in 1832'
is true"; and (B) "'Goethe died in Weimar in 1832' has been accepted since 1873 by
Japanese historians". Absurd as this sounds, Carnap allows that one might at a
stretch be tempted (if one were Neurath) to interpret (and thus "syntactically
eliminate") (A) as "'Goethe died in Weimar in 1832' is presently accepted by this
speaker or writer". So to make the difference even clearer, he gives another pair of
statements: (A *) "'On the dark side of the moon there is a crater bigger than any
visible from Earth' is not true", and (B*) "'On the dark side of the moon there is a
crater bigger than any visible from Earth' is not accepted by scientists in 1937".
Every astronomer, Camap says, will agree with (8*), few or none would be so
daring as to go along with (A *). To insist on making them synonymous would do
unnecessary violence to accepted usage23 . By contrast, Carnap urged, the
emendations to ordinary (scientific) usage required by Tarski's semantic concept of
truth are minimal (ibid., p. 8). In comparison to the disrepair and vagueness in which
most of ordinary language languishes, Carnap argues, Tarski's explication of the
everyday "true" is exceptionally clear and unambiguous (ibid., pp. 8-9).
But explication of the ordinary-language concept of truth was only one
motivation for Carnap's adoption of semantics. More important, probably, was the
gradual recognition that syntax was not, after all, self-sufficient for the logical
analysis of empirical science. And for Carnap the analysis of empirical science -
Wissenschaftslogik - was the point of the whole exercise, as he made clear
throughout the Syntax, as e.g. in the concluding section of the book:

Our thesis that all logic of science is syntax should not be misunderstood to
mean that the task of the logic of science could be addressed without
reference to empirical science and its empirical results ... All work in the logic
of science, all philosophical work, is condemned to sterility if it is not
undertaken in close contact with empirical science. (Carnap, 1934c, p. 260,
my translation)

The inability to do justice to the empirical character of scientific statements - the

very thing that made them scientific, for Carnap as for Hume and Russell - was
therefore a serious handicap for the syntax program. The syntactic writings reflect
this tension. On the one hand Carnap acknowledges that in real-world empirical
science, there is no clear boundary between syntactical and object sentences, that
empirical science makes essential use of both (Carnap, 1934c, pp. 259-60), and that
the empirical character of science results from the confirmation of its sentences by
protocol sentences (Carnap, 1932a, 1932c, 1936c). On the other hand, although
protocol sentences were clearly (non-syntactic) object sentences, and thus intended
22 A.W.CARUS

to schematize observation, the relation between these sentences and the facts they
depict was left obscure, or at least beyond the scope of the investigation, not
expressible in syntax. In effect, then, the empirical character of a questionable
sentence, and even of science itself, could not be discussed within syntax.
Moreover, despite various dogmatic pronouncements during 1932-34, in the heat
of discovery, to the effect that "all logic of science is syntax", Camap was very
straightforward in retrospect about his growing awareness that syntax was not self-
sufficienr4:

Even before the publication of Tarski's article I had realized, chiefly in

conversations with Tarski and GOdel, that there must be a mode, different
from the syntactical one, in which to speak about language. Since it is
obviously admissible to speak about facts and, on the other hand,
Wittgenstein notwithstanding, about expressions of a language, it cannot be
inadmissable to do both in the same metalanguage. (1963, p. 60)

What Tarski had done was to define the semantical concepts in such a way that
they could be used for this obviously essential purpose, and make more systematic
what not only he himself, but all scientific philosophers (including those in Vienna)
had been doing informally all along:

In this way it became possible to speak about the relations between language
and facts. In our philosophical discussions we had, of course, always talked
about these relations; but we had no exact systematized language for this
purpose. In the new metalanguage of semantics, it is possible to make
statements about the relation of designation and about truth. (ibid.)

This, then, was another, and deeper, "language-engineering" reason why it was so
important to find a way of using "true" and "designates" in a way that clearly
distinguishes them from pragmatic concepts (as Camap now called them) of
confirmation or testing. (This distinction, as we have seen, was the starting point of
Camap's controversial Paris conference paper in 1935.) By making this distinction it
became possible at last to do what syntax had signally failed to accomplish - it
became possible to express the relation between a sentence and a fact, and to do it
within the scientific language. Once truth and confirmation are clearly distinguished,
the latter can be separated into two steps: first the confrontation of a sentence with a
fact 25 , and then the comparison of the sentence with the accepted body of scientific
sentences. The latter is, of course, a purely logical exercise (though the procedures to
be followed in the case where the new sentence is incompatible with other
observations, or with established theories, must be explicitly agreed). The fIrst step,
though, of confronting sentence with fact, essentially involves the concept of truth -
"true", in Tarski's semantic conception, is explicated (in an ingenious way that
applies equally to empirical and purely mathematical contexts), roughly speaking, as
''fits with the relevant (confronted) facts". The significance of "fits" here is of course
 CARNAP, SYNTAX AND TRUTH 23

language-relative, a matter of stipulative definition - but this is a matter of

epistemology (which is part of pragmatics), not of semantics. This, then, is how the
Tarski explication of truth enables truth and confirmation to dovetail in a natural,
unforced, economical way - the hallmark of good engineering.

III. CARNAP AND RECENT DISCUSSIONS OF TRUTH

The first two sections have summarized Carnap's views about the issues surrounding
truth during the syntax period and just after, when he admitted the need to bring
semantics into the language of science. Various philosophers have been mentioned in
passing, as foils for or comparisons to Carnap' s views, and perhaps this has made
things cleare~6. But the misunderstandings of Carnap are so pervasive that it will be
helpful, at this point, to articulate his standpoint more vividly by contrasting it with
some more recent discussions of truth.
It is hard to know where to begin. Kirkham's survey of theories of truth (1992)
lists no fewer than seven "projects" in whose service an even larger number of
theories of truth (at least a dozen) have been proposed (Kirkham, 1994, p. 37). These
theories range from full-fledged metaphysical systems, which claim that realism or
anti-realism, for instance, depend on one's theory of truth, to technical treatises in
logic. It is obvious that they do not address the same questions or problems. One
frequent common denominator is the invocation of Tarski's semantic defmition of
truth (1936, 1944), but its status too is much disputed; "there is considerable doubt,"
writes Scott Soames (1984, p. 411), "about whether, or in what sense, it is a theory
of truth." This is mainly due, Soames admits, to confusion about what a theory of
truth should be in the first place.
Opinion on this question is of course finely divided, but with a modicum of
regimentation one can discern two main camps: the "deflationists" who think truth is
essentially trivial, of no larger philosophical importance, and those who, like
Davidson, regard truth as "an essential part of the scheme we all necessarily employ
for understanding, criticizing, explaining, and predicting thought and action" (1990,
p. 282i7 . A good deal of the controversy between these views takes the form of rival
interpretations of Tarski (Soames, 1984; Field, 1972, 1987; Putnam, 1983). What all
seem to agree on is that Tarski did not, whatever he himself may have thought,
define the concept of truth; he showed, rather, "how to defme a truth predicate for
each of a number of well-behaved languages," as Davidson puts it,

but these definitions do not, of course, tell us what these predicates have in
common. Put a little differently: he defmed various predicates of the form's
is trueL', each applicable to a single language, but he failed to defme a
predicate of the form's is true in L' for variable L. (Davidson, 1990, p. 285)

A similar point had previously been made by Black (1949), Dummett (1958), and
Putnam (1985); the latter concludes that the property Tarski had defined is not "even
doubtfully or dubiously 'close' to the property of truth. It just isn't truth at all" (ibid.,
24 AW.CARUS

p. 64). This "failure" of Tarski's has been embraced by detlationists, however, as a

success - in showing that a general defmition cannot be given. As Davidson (an anti-
detlationist) puts it, this argument,

intended to reveal Tarski as a detlationist, can be taken two ways: as showing

that he did not capture essential aspects of the concept of truth, or as showing
that the concept of truth is not as deep and interesting as many have thought
(Davidson, 1990, p. 288)

Davidson himself thinks, like Dummett and Putnam, that it must be taken in the
fIrst of these two ways. For him, a theory of truth is ''the conceptual underpinning of
interpretation" and truth "rests in the end on belief and, even more ultimately, the
affective attitudes". (ibid., p. 326)
Putnam is more explicit about the supposedly "essential aspects of the concept of
truth" that Tarski had missed. Tarski's account is just fIne for mathematical logic,
Putnam says, "because all that a logician wants of a truth defInition is that it should
capture the extension (denotation) of 'true' as applied to L, not that it should capture
the sense - the intuitive notion of truth ... " Here then we have the critical point, for
Putnam: "But the concern of philosophy is precisely to discover what the intuitive
notion of truth is. As a philosophical account of truth, Tarski's theory fails as badly
as it is possible to fail." (Putnam, 1985, p. 64)
For Camap, as we have seen, the concern of philosophy is precisely not "to
discover what the intuitive notion of truth" (or of anything else) is! The concern of
philosophy is explication, as described in Section I above. And in that task our
intuitive notions can at best, with some clarifIcation, provide explicanda, rough and
ready concepts to be replaced by the more exact ones imported from a more
precisely specifIed scientifIc language.
Interestingly, Putnam anticipates such a rejoinder: "One possible reaction," he
writes, "to my criticism of Tarski's account as an account of our intuitive notion of
truth would be to dismiss the intuitive notion as something of no real interest." In this
vein someone might say:

If Tarski's notion isn't the intuitive one, so much the worse for the intuitive
one! ... Tarski has given us a substitute for the intuitive notion that is adequate
for our scientifIc purposes ... and one that is defmed in a precise way. From
now on, Tarskian truth is all the truth we shall want or need. (ibid., pp. 64-65;
my italics)

"That," says Putnam, "would be the reaction of Quine." It would certainly have
been the reaction of Camap. Are Camap and Quine in such close agreement, then, on
this issue? Putnam seems to think so: "Quine would, in any case, not take talk of the
'meaning' of the word true seriously... The task of philosophy is not the
examination of our intuitive notions, in Quine's view, but rather the construction of a
substitute for those notions based on fIrst-class science." (ibid., p. 65) This
 CARNAP, SYNTAX AND TRUTH 25

contlation of Camap and Quine is instructive, for our present purposes, for it enables
us to see just how far present philosophy is from Camap. It is so far removed, in fact,
that from its standpoint, Camap and Quine can appear indistinguishable!
Which in fact they are not, at least in this matter of language engineering or of
replacing our intuitive notions, our inherited concepts, with better and more precise
ones. It is true that Quine allows empirically for such a process of concept
substitution based on science (e.g. Quine, 1976, pp. 232-4). But unlike Camap he
does not seem to think it is something we can control, or even nudge in a desired
direction. For Quine, the drift of usage is beyond intentional fashioning (e.g. Quine,
1963, p. 394-5). Nor can we, in his view, shore up islands of stability (in the form of
artificial, precisely stipulated languages of mathematics and science) against the
universal oceanic drift, since for Quine, without an analytic-synthetic distinction we
are left without the means to distinguish clearly between natural and formalized
languages and thus between Carnap's internal and external questions (Quine, 1976,
pp.210-11).
We can't, therefore, in Quine'S view, step outside our conceptual scheme (which
is all of apiece) and judge it from without, as e.g. more or less suitable for some
human purpose. We are consigned forever to Neurath's boat (which evidently lacks
an engine, or even a rudder, and never calls at any port), we are never able to take a
larger, strategic, external perspective on our system of knowledge. This, too,
astonishingly, Putnam acknowledges, when he points out that Quine fmds himself
forced back, in the end, to "acquiescing in our mother tongue and taking its words at
face value" (Quine, 1969, p. 49); only thus, says Putnam, can Quine avoid the
endless regress of metalanguages needed to underpin reference. The ontological
notions of reality and fact are seen, ultimately, to be necessarily "parochial": "Truth
is immanent, and there is no higher. We must speak from within a theory ... " (Quine,
1981, pp. 21-22)
Camap, too, accepts (as we have seen) that ultimate notions of fact and reality
remain "parochial" in the sense of language-relative. But not in the sense that we
must acquiesce in the categories of the mother tongue. Fundamental to Camap's
view is the idea that we can step back from our conceptual involvements and view
them critically. As even Putnam sees, Quine takes an ultimately passive attitude
toward our natural language; though the task of philosophy (in the view Putnam
attributes to Quine) be the "construction of a substitute" for our intuitive notions, we
have nothing to fall back on, in the end, but acquiescence in other, deeper, but still
intuitive notions. So with respect to this question of language engineering, at least,
Camap and Quine are evidently far from indistinguishable. If Camap's view is an
"engineering approach" to language, perhaps Quine's view should be called one of
"sandcastle engineering" - I can rebuild or re-engineer the language to my heart's
content, but whatever I build with will be washed away by the next tide. The
mudtlats out of which we crawled, reassuming their geological contours, are all I can
hope to "limn the most general traits" of by regimenting the mother tongue.
Putnam is right to say that Quine does not take ordinary language as the true
north on his compass. But it is hard to dispute that the elimination of the analytic-
26 A.W. CARUS

synthetic distinction, and the consequent blurring, post-Quine, of the boundary

between natural and formalized languages, has made the search for "the" concept of
truth (in natural language, or in our intuitive conceptual scheme) respectable again28 •
This search would have been, for Carnap, a pointless chimera29 •
Let us tum, then, to the other side of the current debates about truth, the
deflationist side, whose spirit, at least, is certainly in much closer sympathy with
Carnap's view. Once again, it is hard to pick a representative example, but one
influential and widely-quoted version of deflationism is that put forward by Paul
Horwich in his book Truth (1990). At first glance, it appears that Horwich's
approach shares many features of Carnap's. Like Carnap, Horwich holds that truth is
entirely language-relative, and that there is no "transcendental" way of defming truth
(Horwich, 1990, pp. 75-77, 110-25). And like Carnap, Horwich (ibid., pp. 77-79)
accordingly holds that the concept of truth has no role to play in the "foundations" of
logic, i.e. to justify one logic over another. Carnap certainly thought truth could be
defined, and the concept used, without thereby committing one's self to any sort of
realism, and Horwich follows him in this (ibid., pp. 55-62). And like Carnap,
Horwich also draws a clear distinction between truth and confirmation, and thinks it
essential not to confuse them (ibid., pp. 66-70).
However, there are also differences. To bring them into focus, it will help to
observe how Carnap introduces the notion of truth, e.g. in his Introduction to
Semantics (1942). A "semantical system", he writes there, is

... a system of rules, formulated in a metalanguage and referring to an object

language, of such a kind that the rules determine a truth-condition for every
sentence of the object language, i.e. a sufficient and necessary condition for
its truth. In this way the sentences are interpreted by the rules, i.e. made
understandable, because to understand a sentence, to know what is asserted
by it, is the same as to know under what conditions it would be true. (Camap,
1942, p. 22)30

Camap then states a general condition of adequacy for a truth-defmition in a

language with an infinite number of sentences: "We use the term here in such a sense
that to assert that a sentence is true means the same as to assert the sentence itself"
(ibid., p. 26) But he immediately makes very clear that this is nothing at all like a
"theory of truth"; it is, rather, a "decision concerning the use of the term 'true"'. Nor
is it, of course, a definition: "It is rather a standard by which we judge whether a
definition for truth is adequate, i.e. in accord with our intention." (ibid.) And what is
that intention? It is not only the specific goals of language engineering described in
Section II above, but the wider goal of solving the problems raised by analytic
philosophy since Russell and Frege31 • Moreover, the framework of semantics put
forward in the book is to be judged entirely by its success in furthering those larger
goals:
 CARNAP, SYNTAX AND TRUTH 27

Will the semantical method lead to fruitful results? Since the development of
semantics is still in its very beginning, it is too early to give a well-founded
answer ... [among other uses,] I believe, semantics will be of great importance
for the so-called theory of knowledge and the methodology of mathematics
and of empirical science. However, the form in which semantics is
constructed in this book need not necessarily be the most appropriate for that
purpose. This form is only a first attempt ... (ibid., p. xii)

What emerges here is something different in kind from Horwich's deflationism,

something motivated by a different attitude. Horwich regards his view (in his own
words) as a "theory" of truth (Horwich, 1990, p. 7). He argues that there is no other
or further or deeper theory to be "found" (ibid., p. 126). In his presentation at the
Prague conference (September 1996), he adduced "evidence" for this "hypothesis,,32.
He maintains that all uses of the truth predicate are "explained" by the "hypothesis"
that truth has a certain "raison d'etre" (ibid., pp. 126-27). "In fact," he says (ibid., p.
2), "the truth predicate exists solely for the sake of a certain logical need," which he
then proceeds to explain. These expressions appear to indicate that for Horwich,
unlike Carnap, there is a matter of fact (albeit a minimal one) about the concept of
truth.
And here we are confronted with the really fundamental difference between
Camap and both camps of current philosophers - both the deflationists and their
opponents. Both sides are concerned to fmd, or to pin down, or to work out, "the"
concept of truth. For Camap there is no such thing; concepts are not "out there" for
us to find; it is our responsibility to make them. To seek the concept of truth would
have made no sense to Carnap; he would have regarded such a quest as a misguided
reverence for artefacts of our natural and cultural inheritance, comparable to a quest
for the correct concept of transsubstantiation. Such passiveness toward our inherited
natural-language concepts is entirely foreign to Carnap; his attitude, expressed in his
project of explication, was that we should take the matter into our own hands, and
create the language we need for our purposes, whatever those may be33 • Truth, for
Camap, is not something for which there could be a "correct", or somehow
ultimately "right" explication. The decision is ours. There is no fact of the matter
about truth for our explication to correspond or to fit to; there is only the engineering
problem of how our explication of truth fits with the rest of our handiwork.

IV. ANSWERS

Against that background, the answers to our three questions should be obvious. The
terms "coherence theory" and "correspondence theory" presuppose philosophical
conceptions that Camap rejects. They imply that there is, or might be, a fact of the
matter about truth, built into the logical nature of things or into our ineluctable
human framework of thought - rather than a decision to be made, in furtherance of
our larger goals for the whole scientific or cognitive enterprise.
28 A.W. CARUS

Question (l) asked whether Carnap maintained a "coherence theory" of truth

during the syntax period. A "coherence theory" implies that truth is guaranteed by
the consistency of all the statements in the language, with no recourse to anything
extra-linguistic. But Carnap did not, even at the height of his syntax enthusiasm,
accept that syntax was self-sufficient, as we have seen above. Though theoretical
sentences were to be tested only by other sentences, the protocol sentences, the latter
were object sentences and were held to schematize experience or observation in
some way. Accounting for this schematization was a hurdle for the syntax project,
one that ultimately tripped it up, but this does not change the fact that such a
schematization was an essential part of Carnap's view throughout the syntax period.
Moreover, Carnap largely avoided the concept of truth during this period, precisely
because of the pitfalls he saw in the explications of it then available. It would be both
inaccurate and otiose, then, to attribute a "coherence theory of truth" to the syntactic
Carnap (even if he had not specifically expressed his strong disapproval of it, e.g. in
a letter to Schlick of 17 May 1934 (ASP RudolfCarnap papers 029-28-14, p. 1)).
This disposes of question (l).
Did Carnap give up empiricism during the syntax period (this was question (2))?
Within the framework of logical and linguistic pluralism, empiricism cannot,
obviously, be a transcendental doctrine about the ultimate nature of what exists. It is,
rather, simply a proposal that synthetic sentences not be admitted to the language of
science "unless they have some connection with possible observations, a connection
which has to be characterized in a suitable way" (Carnap, 1936c, p. 33; cf. Ricketts,
1994). Carnap continues to argue for this proposal, and seek suitable
characterizations for this connection, throughout the syntax period (esp. in Carnap,
193Za, 193Zb, 193Zc, 1934b). This disposes of question (Z).
But neither is it appropriate to say that Carnap subsequently "returned" to
anything like a "correspondence theory". In Tarski's (1944) characterization, a
correspondence theory is one that interprets truth to mean "correspondence with
reality". Carnap is very explicit even after his acceptance of semantics that, although
he advocates the acceptance of the realistic thing-language for evidence statements
within an overall language of science, he does not regard this as a solution, or any
kind of response, to the philosophical problem of realism - which remains an
external question, to be addressed pragmatically if at all. (1950, pp. 207-08).
Carnap's linguistic pluralism eliminates talk of "reality" outside the framework of a
particular language. This disposes of question (3).

University of Chicago

NOTES
• I am grateful to Paul Horwich, Eckehard KOhler, Jan Wolenski, and other conference participants for
conversation about the issues surrounding this paper at the Prague conference on truth in September
1996. I am also grateful to the organizers, especially Jaroslav Peregrin, for their hospitality and for
providing such ideal surroundings for a conference. Camap lived in Prague from 1931 to 1935 - which
 CARNAP, SYNTAX AND TRUTH 29

coincides almost exactly with his syntax period. He felt at home in the city, and was honored to have
Masaryk's personal signature on the "Emennungsurkunde" for his position at the German University. He
left reluctantly for Chicago, in 1935, and often looked back fondly on his time in Prague. I am also
grateful to Steve Awodey, Mike Price, and Howard Stein for discussion about Camap and truth, and to
Erich Reck for his detailed and very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
I In what is still unfortunately one of the very few book-length treatments of the Vienna Circle and its
intellectual background, his The Semantic Traditionfrom Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station (1991).
On the issue under discussion here, see especially Ch. 15-19, pp. 272-374. Coffa's view has been
criticized by several writers, e.g. Ricketts (1994, 1996) and Creath (1991).

2 Russell called the syntax view "an attempt to make the linguistic world self-sufficient", and moreover
that according to that view, "". empirical truth can be determined by the police. This doctrine, it is
evident, is a complete abandonment of empiricism, of which the essence is that only experiences can
determine the truth or falsehood of non-tautologous propositions." (1940, pp. 147-8) Coffa (1991) largely
agrees, despite much closer acquaintance with not only Camap's published works, but also many
unpublished documents; see note I above.
3 Wittgenstein departed from Frege's and Russell's universal conception of logic in at least one crucial
respect; he came to see logic as being not about everything, but as being about nothing at all, as being
vacuous, and as inhering rather in the nature of representation than in anything factual; see Ricketts,
1996b. However, he did not depart from his predecessors in this matter of the single true logic; he spoke
not of possible logics, but always of "logic" [die Logik], e.g. in Tractatus (1922) 5.453-4. See also
Friedman (1997), e.g. p. 25.

4 Despite the fact that Ayer claimed, in his original preface of 1936, that "the philosophers with whom I
am in the closest agreement are those who compose the 'Viennese circle' ... And of these lowe the most
to Camap." (1946, p. 42) Also, Ayer's collection of translated Vienna Circle articles, published under the
title Logical Positivism (1959), contains only items from the pre-syntactic period - except for a paper of
his own, "Verification and Experience", which criticizes and rejects the entire approach of language
pluralism (referring to Logical Syntax and other works), though on the basis of a perhaps less than
complete understanding.
S Even the most recent (and generally well-informed) account, by Haller (1993). Earlier accounts do no
better; Bergmann (1954) fails to mention syntax or language pluralism; Kraft (1968) mentions syntax in
passing but not logical pluralism. Hanfling (1981) mentions pluralism very briefly, but doesn't take it
seriously. And although Popper's various representations of Vienna Circle ideas, e.g. his autobiography
(1974) or his Schilpp essay on Camap, praise Logical Syntax ("if ever a history of the rational philosophy
of the earlier half of this century should be written, this book ought to have a place in it second to none"
(Popper, 1963, p. 203», they never once even acknowledge the idea oflanguage pluralism.

6 Especially Richard Creath, Michael Friedman, Warren Goldfarb, and Thomas Ricketts. There are, of
course, philosophers of the post-Vienna-Circle generation on whom Camap's pluralism was not lost; see
for instance Jeffrey (1994) and Stein (1992).

7 "The aim of this book is to supply the essential tool for practising the logic of science, in the form of an
exact syntactic method ... earlier attempts to cast off the ship of logic from the rigid mooring of the
classical forms were certainly bold, in a historical sense. But they were constrained by their striving for
"correctness". Now the chains have been thrown off; the open sea of free possibilities lies before us."
(Camap, 1934c, pp. IV-VI; my translation)

8 Among many other passages, this is evident in Camap, 1942, p. 247; Camap, 1950a, passim (esp. the
concluding paragraph); Camap, 1963, pp. 55, 66.

9 This approach to controversies of any kind whatever became one of Camap's hallmarks after 1932; the
rationale for it is discussed e.g. in Camap's first English-language publication, the article "On the
Character of Philosophic Problems" (1934a).
30 A.W.CARUS

10 Bergmann (1964, p. 177) apparently first attributed to Camap this "linguistic turn", though he - and
following him Richard RoTty (RoTty, 1967) - seriously misunderstood it (see below, footnote 20). In the
description that follows, Camap's later views and terminology are freely drawn on. This is not to imply
that there was no further development after 1932 (or 1935). But it can be argued that the later
development draws out ideas already implicit in the works of the mid-1930's. The terminology of
"explication" was not introduced until the 1940's; it is most elaborately discussed in the opening sections
of Logical Foundations ofProbability (Camap, 1950b).

II Camap was less cognizant than many current writers that human purposes, even with respect to
scientific enquiry, may differ; he does not, at any rate, emphasize it as much as many present philosophers
and historians of science. But he was perfectly aware that there could be different points of view, and that
even the ultimate goal of the scientific enterprise might be a matter of discussion. See for example
Camap, 1963, p. 51, as well as Reisch, 1991.) But he would very likely have objected that current writers
exaggerate the extent of the ultimate differences. And although he would have conceded (as he did e.g. in
1932c, pp. 179-180 - long before Kuhn) that different languages are possible, he would have denied that
this makes them absolutely incomparable or incommensurable; in fact he would have thought that the
results achieved by the different languages should be systematically monitored and compared. Howard
Stein reports that when Camap responded to Quine's paper "On Camap's Views on Ontology" at a
Chicago colloquium in 1951, Camap summarized the issue between himself and Quine roughly as
follows: "Quine and I really differ, not concerning any matter of fact, nor any question with cognitive
content, but rather in our respective estimates of the most fruitful course for science to follow. Quine is
impressed by the continuity between scientific thought and that of daily life - between scientific language
and the language of ordinary discourse - and sees no philosophical gain, no gain either in clarity or in
fruitfulness, in the construction of distinct formalized languages for science. I concede the continuity, but,
on the contrary, believe that very important gains in clarity and fruitfulness are to be had from the
introduction of such formally constructed languages. This is a difference of opinion which, despite the
fact that it does not concern (in my own terms) a matter with cognitive content, is nonetheless in principle
susceptible of a kind of rational resolution. In my view, both programs - mine of formalized languages,
Quine's ofa more free-flowing and casual use ofJanguage - ought to be pursued; and I think that if Quine
and I could live, say, for two hundred years, it would be possible at the end of that time for us to agree on
which of the two programs had proved more successful". (Stein, 1992, pp. 278-79; "QUine," adds Stein,
"happily assented to Camap's diagnosis.")
12 As Quine says we must; see page 24 below.
13 As described in Camap, 1955a. This article has, however, given rise to enormous misunderstandings;
though Camap often emphasized that natural language had a quite different status from formalized
systems, he sometimes (as in this article) took the difference so much for granted that some readers (such
as Quine, perhaps) have thought that Camap intended his entire theory as one of ordinary language (or as
applying equally to it); cf Stein, 1992, pp. 282-4.

14 Not as suitable, of course, as a more precisely specified meta-language would be. Camap encouraged
the creation of such formalized pragmatic metalanguages, though he realized that the ultimate goal of
complete formalization within the pragmatic realm was distant and utopian. (Camap, 1955b)

IS Any more than every explicandum is necessarily explicable; there may well be natural language
concepts (like "god"), or subcultural outgrowths of natural language (like "being", or the verb ''to
nothing") that are beyond clarification, and should therefore be avoided or eliminated rather than
explicated.

16 Howard Stein's remarks on this issue are instructive: "The explicatum, as an exactly characterized
concept, belongs to some formalized discourse - some 'framework'. The explicandum - if such there is -
belongs ipso facto to a mode of discourse outside that framework. Therefore any question about the
relation of the explicatum to the explicandum is an 'external question'; this holds, in particular, of the
question whether an explication is adequate - that is, whether the explicatum does in some appropriate
 CARNAP, SYNTAX AND TRUTH 31

sense fully represent, within the framework, the function performed (let us say) 'presystematically' by the
explicandum.... The question of the nature of 'presystematic notions' is obviously very complex - and
somewhat vague ... perhaps usefully vague. It would be easy to cite cases in which a notion of this type-
or at any rate, a word in general use - can be said to have been explicated by more than one precise
explicatum. The other possibility is that a newly proposed exact concept does not correspond very well to
any presystematic notion at all '" what counts in the end '" [for Camap] is the clarity and utility of the
proposal; whether part of that utility has to do with an earlier, vaguer, general usage is distinctly a
secondary matter." (Stein, 1992, pp. 280-82)

17 The precise date of this conversion is still uncertain; more detail on Camap's development during this
period will be forthcoming in a volume about Camap's logicism that I am presently working on.
18 As recounted in one of the more dramatic moments of Camap's autobiography: "After thinking about
these problems for several years, the whole theory of language structure and its possible applications to
philosophy came to me like a vision during a sleepless night in January 1931, when I was ill. On the
following day, still in bed with a fever, I wrote down my ideas on forty-four pages under the title "Attempt
at a Metalogic". These shorthand notes were the first version of my book Logical Syntax of Language."
(Camap, 1963, p. 53) What Camap omits to mention is that these notes were the first version of
Language I of the Syntax, which was intended as the only - the universal -language. Thus of course there
was no Language II at that point, no principle of tolerance, and no Chapter IV.

19 One of these was worked out in some detail; a fragment was published as Camap, 1930. The whole
extant manuscript, which runs into several hundred pages, bears the title Untersuchungen zur
allgemeinen Axiomatik. It has been discussed (somewhat misleadingly) by Coffa in Ch. 15 (pp. 272-84)
of The Semantic Tradition (Coffa, 1991). For an alternative account see Awodey and Carus (1998).

20 In response to a question about this from von Neumann, Camap replied, "Yes, well, there certainly exist
sentences of very different kinds ... but all of them, even the metalogical ones, are in one language." (ASP
Rudolf Camap papers 081-07-19, p. 8) This attitude is also evident in other writings of that time; in
"Oberwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache", published in 1932, Heidegger's
formulations are rejected as meaningless because they are not translatable into a "logically correct
language". (Camap, 1932d, p. 230) Unfortunately, Rorty (1967, pp. 5-6) took this as an expression of the
later (compound) doctrine of the published Logical Syntax, whose pluralism he, like Ayer and other
commentators, entirely fails to notice.

21 Goldfarb and Ricketts, 1992; Ricketts, 1994, 1996a; Creath, 1991; for a partly dissenting view, see
Oberdan, 1992.
22 In his "Wahrheit und Bewahrung" (1936b), the very paper that caused such a commotion at the Paris
conference. ("To my surprise, there was vehement opposition even on the side of our philosophical
friends ... There we had long and heated debates ... " (Carnap, 1963, p. 61»

23ASP RudolfCamap papers 080-32-01, pp. 4-5. Camap's examples have been paraphrased a little in the
interest of brevity. The entire document is a ten-page typescript that was obviously prepared with some
care.

24 Another quite independent reason that syntax is not self-sufficient appears to arise from a remark of
Camap's in first presentation of the syntax to the Vienna Circle, in June 1931. There he asks: is the
statement "a formula of a form so-and-so is a disjunction" analytic, empirical, or of some other status?
Analytic, he answers. For the fact that a formula with this and this description is a disjunction is an
immediate consequence of the meta-logical (i.e. syntactic) definition of "disjunction". On the other hand,
he says, the statement that the formula on the blackboard is a disjunction is an empirical one (ASP Rudolf
Camap papers 081-07-17, p. 5).
But Camap would appear to have missed a critical point here: The "description" which does the work
of defining the formula (and thus making the sentence about it analytic) cannot be either syntactical or
empirical. If it were syntactical, it would not map a sign onto a class of physical objects (chalk marks, ink
32 AW.CARUS

spots, phoneme strings) - a syntactical description could only map signs onto other signs. And an
empirical sentence (an "object sentence") could define a class of empirical objects (marks, phonemes),
but could not assign that class (by means of the relation "stands for") to a sign. In fact this gap seems
impossible to bridge without a relation of designation - a semantic relation between word and thing that
Camap was at such pains to avoid in 1931, and was happy to accept a few years later.
It is perhaps a sign of his uneasiness on this score that this remark from his first presentation to the
Vienna Circle does not reappear in the Syntax or any published work. The definition of "sign" in the
Syntax tries to avoid the issue entirely: "By a calculus we mean a system of fixed rules [Festsetzungen] of
the following kind. The rules apply to elements, called signs, about whose nature and interrelations
nothing more is assumed than their division into classes." (Camap, 1934c, p. 4) And a few paragraphs
down: "The term 'sign' is here intended to mean no more than 'character' ['Figurl There is no
assumption that such a sign has a reference [Bedeutung] or designates [bezeichnet] anything." (ibid., p. 5)
But beneath the vaguer surface, we see that, once again, the first of these remarks still attempts to describe
"sign" syntactically - and gives no clue how to recognize a sign as a sign. And the second remark still
attempts to describe "sign" empirically - but lacks a way of aSSigning signhood to the "character"
(equivalence class of physical objects) in question. Though this problem never became very explicit in
Camap's writings, it is hard to imagine that it didn't weigh on his conscience.
25 Camap uses this word advisedly, since the traditional formulation of "comparing" a sentence with a
fact gives rise even more easily to the misconception that the fact is just "out there" available for
inspection, and not mediated by the language we have chosen for schematizing empirical evidence
(Camap, 1936b, p. 22). Davidson (1986) says "If meanings are given by objective truth conditions there
is a question how we can know that the conditions are satisfied, for this would appear to require a
confrontation between what we believe and reality; and the idea of such a confrontation is absurd."
(Davidson, 1986, p. 307). And in his (1973) Davidson denies that there can be a distinction between
"scheme (or language) and un interpreted content" (Davidson, 1973, p. 187). But for Camap both
"scheme" and "content" are a matter of agreed conventions within formal frameworks. Where Davidson
apparently wants to insist on a more thoroughgoing holism (in which "content" is already embedded in
"scheme"), Camap would have given us (the users and makers of the language) more of a choice in the
matter. He would certainly have preferred a single language for all of knowledge, but regarded that
preference as a programme, a proposal, not a fact in the nature of language (or whatever) to be accepted
passively; and certainly not one he would have defined into the very concept of a language. Also, in
acknowledging that it sounds suspect to speak of "comparing a sentence with a fact", Camap reminded
his readers that it is equally suspect to deny that such a comparison is possible (Camap, I936b, p. 23).
26 Though it might well repay the effort to pursue the similarities with late Wittgenstein; Michael
Williams (1991), suggesting just this, remarks: "One ofCamap's most fundamental ideas is that truth is
an intra-theoretic notion. Propositions are true-in-a-framework, but the framework itself is not
meaningfully thought of as either true or false." (Williams, 1996, p. 30) Tom Ricketts, in the same spirit,
says (1994, p. 177) that [understood in an absolute sense] "Camap does not draw on any notion of truth,
on a notion of something's making a statement true."
27 One need not, to accept the existence of this dichotomy in the current literature, accept that it reflects
anything of importance about the issues involved. It is in fact rather difficult to characterize the
difference between deflationists and their opponents with any precision. That the deflationists have
opponents is clear; Davidson for his part has devoted considerable space in his most recent papers on
truth (1990, 1996) to refuting deflationism. In any case, the emphasis in this section is not on the
differences between these camps, but on the assumptions they share that Camap rejected.
28 Perhaps this is what Davidson meant when he said that Quine's elimination of the analytic-synthetic
distinction "saved philosophy of language as a serious subject" (Davidson, 1986, p. 313) - an opinion
warmly endorsed by Rorty (1986, p. 339).
29 Thus Camap in his reply to Davidson in the Schilpp volume (1963): "At the end of his essay Davidson
raises an important general question of policy for the construction and analysis of a language. He says that
 CARNAP, SYNTAX AND TRUTH 33

the primary goal is 'to interpret or rationally reconstruct the language we understand the best and need the
most'. I would agree with this if it means that the language of formal reconstruction must be such that it
serves our needs in the best and most clearly understandable way; but I would not agree if the phrase 'we
understand the best' means that the language of reconstruction must be as close as possible to the
customary form of ordinary language." (Schilpp, 1963, p. 913) See also Carnap's reply to Strawson (ibid.,
pp. 933-40).
30 Note that in this proposal the notions of "understanding" and "knowing" are made parasitic on, or
reducible to, the (stipulated) Tarskian concept of truth, not vice versa.
31 Of which Carnap, in an appendix to the Introduction to Semantics (Carnap, 1942, §38, pp. 242-46),
give a partial list: the construction of a general semantics and general syntax, the interpretation of the
propositional calculus, the study of extensional vs. non-extensional languages, resolution of semantical
antinomies, the general theory of axiom systems, the development of a theory of confirmation (including
the definition of "degree of confirmation"), the application of "semiotic" (syntax, semantics, and
pragmatics) to empirical science, and the resolution of philosophical problems.
32Consistently with these formulations, he suggested in conversation at the Prague conference (September
1996) that his view of truth could be regarded as an "empirical hypothesis about English". See also his
paper (this volume).
33 Richard Jeffrey calls this attitude one of "voluntarism": "Carnap's voluntarism was a humanistic
version of Descartes's explanation of the truths of arithmetic as holding because God willed them: not just
'Let there be light,' but 'Let 1 + 1 = 2' and all the rest. Carnap substituted humanity for God in this
scheme ... Item: Descartes was stonewalling, using God's fiat to block further inquiry. It is not for us to
inquire why He chose 2 instead of 3. But for our ownfiat the question is not what it was, but what it will
be: choice of means to our chosen ends ... Philosophically, Carnap was a social democrat; his ideals were
those of the enlightenment. His persistent, central idea was: 'It's high time we took charge of our own
mental lives' - time to engineer our own conceptual scheme (language, theories) as best we can to serve
our own purposes; time to take it back from tradition, time to dismiss Descartes's God as a distracting
myth, time to accept the fact that there's nobody out there but us, to choose our purposes and concepts to
serve those purposes ... For Carnap, deliberate choice of the syntax and semantics of our language was
more than a possibility - it was a duty we owe ourselves as a corollary of freedom." (Jeffrey, 1994, p.
847)

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Quine, W.v.O.: 1981 Theories and Things, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Reisch, G.A.: 1991, 'Did Kuhn Kill Logical Empiricism?', Philosophy of Science 58, 264-277.
Ricketts, T.: 1994, 'Camap's Principle of Tolerance, Empiricism, and Conventionalism' in P. Clark and
B. Hale (eds.): Reading Putnam, Oxford, Blackwell, 176-200.
Ricketts, T.: 1996a, 'Camap: From Logical Syntax to Semantics' in R. Giere and A. Richardson (eds.),
The Origins of Logical Empiricism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 231-250.
Ricketts, T.: 1996b, 'Pictures, Logic, and the Limits of Sense in Wittgenstein's Tractatus', in H. Sluga
and D.G. Stem (eds.): The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 59-99.
Rorty, R.: 1967, 'Introduction' in R. Rorty (ed.): The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical
Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Rorty, R.: 1986, 'Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth' in E. LePore (ed.): Truth and Interpretation;
Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald DaVidson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 333-355.
Russell, B.: 1940, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, London, Allen & Unwin.
Schilpp, P. (ed.) 1963, The Philosophy of RudolfCarnap, LaSalle, IL, Open Court.
Soames, S.: 1984, 'What is a Theory ofTruth?', Journal of Philosophy 81, 411-429.
Stein, H.: 1992, 'Was Carnap Entirely Wrong, After All?', Synthese 93, 275-295.
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• Unpublished materials from the Camap Papers in the Archive of Scientific Philosophy, Hillman Library,
University of Pittsburgh, Special Collections Department, are cited in the text in tbe form "ASP Rudolf
Camap papers xx-yy-u.", where xx indicates box number, yy folder number, and u. item number. I am
grateful to the curator of the Archive of Scientific Philosophy, Gerald Heverly, for his assistance with
these materials. They are quoted here by permission; all rights reserved by Hillman Library, University of
Pittsburgh.
 MAJEDAOMAR

JAMES'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH

One question to which truth theorists were challenged to provide an answer is

Pilate's ancient question: "What is truth?" An answer is expected to explain what it
is for something to be true or false. Rival explanations have been advanced: truth is
correspondence, truth is coherence, truth is warranted assertability, truth is
workability, truth is disquotation. The traditional theories construe Pilate as
demanding an account of the nature of truth so they offer different explanations and
debate as to which one of them has rightly captured the unique nature of truth. On
the other hand, adherents of disquotationism see these quarrels among the
proponents of the rival theories as completely beside the point. According to them,
authors of traditional theories have been drawn into unintelligible, metaphysical or
even mystical intellectual adventures. For, according to disquotationalists, truth has
no nature.
The aim of my paper is to examine and evaluate the different responses to
William James's theory of truth by adherents of alternative theories of truth. Why
would a correspondence theorist like G. E. Moore reject James's theory? What
motivates a coherence theorist like F. H. Bradley to criticise James's theory? Why
did a disquotationalist like A. J. Ayer construe James's theory in the fashion he did?
And why did T. L. S. Sprigge, though he sympathises with James, regard his theory
as incomplete?

JAMES'S PRONOUNCEMENTS ON THE THEORY

James's theory of truth engendered a storm of controversy and criticism. It was at

first dismissed and indeed ridiculed by many philosophers who thought that it
amounted to nothing more than the equating of truth with both expediency and
workability. It is fair to say that the form in which James presented his views was not
sufficiently clear to avoid misunderstandings. But, such characterisation of them is
indeed narrow, let alone an unfair summary of a complex and subtle theory.
James has given several statements of his conception of truth which express the
various aspects of his theory. The main features of his account can be outlined as
follows. James maintained that there would be no truth had there been no mind
which could know reality through ideas. Truth is thus a property of thought and not
of propositions. A true idea agrees with the reality of which it is true. But, if
agreement means only copying, then truth becomes an empirically vacuous notion
which could only be made intelligible if it is 'cashed out' in experiential terms.

37
J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), 37-50.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
38 MAJEDAOMAR

Hence, true ideas are those which agree with reality, whereby agreeing means
leading, fitting or any other process pragmatically defined. Among the various
processes defmed as such, the verification-process is the most fundamental. Truth is
not an inert property of an idea: it is something that happens to an idea through its
verification. Truth is thus a process or event - the process of verifying an idea in
experience.
For James, a belief is accepted as true, if and only if it is consistent with
previously held beliefs or causes a minimal change in the stock of old beliefs. When
deciding which beliefs to accept, beliefs of any kind whatsoever, we are justified in
applying subjective criteria only when objective criteria prove unhelpful. Thus, in
some cases, we are justified in accepting beliefs as true according to their being
useful and emotionally satisfying, when and only when objective evidence (logical or
empirical) is unattainable. Finally, James held that there are many viewpoints from
which the world can be interpreted. One cannot speak of the single and unique true
angle of vision.
It is hoped that this sketch of the main ideas that James expressed in his various
statements about truth will guide us in our examination of the different responses and
criticisms proposed by our four philosophers. In the first instance, a start will be
made by examining the criticisms of one philosopher who ranks among James's
sharpest critics.

JAMES AND G. E. MOORE

As a keen defender of the common-sense viewpoint, Moore was hostile to any other
view of truth which he believed to depart from or to conflict with common sense.
According to Moore, a belief is true, if and only if it corresponds to a fact (Moore,
1965, p. 277). As to the nature of this 'correspondence', Moore admits that it is
difficult to analyse. However, it is the kind of relation that holds between a belief, if
true, and one fact only, where both sides of the relation are specified by the use of
the same sentential expression. Accordingly, when a belief corresponds to a fact, the
belief is described as 'the belief that P' and the fact as 'the fact that P', where 'P' is
a sentential expression of some kind (Sprigge, 1993, p. 16).
According to Moore, James's only objection to the copy theory of truth is that
'copying' is not a property of all true ideas, since some of our true ideas do not
actually copy reality (Moore, 1922, p. 98). However, Moore held that verification
and utility are the properties which James thought to have belonged to all true ideas.
'Our true ideas, he [James] seems to say, are those that "work," in the sense that they
are or can be "verified," or are "useful'" (Moore, 1922, p. 97). Consequently, James
sought to establish some connection between truth and verification or utility by
asserting that (l) we can verify all those of our ideas, which are true; (2) that all
those among our ideas, which we can verify, are true; (3) that all our true ideas are
useful and (4) that all those of our ideas, which are useful, are true. Moore had no
serious objection to (2) but he had serious objections to (3) and (4) the basis of
which were that all true ideas are not at all times useful and that we do at times have
 JAMES'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH 39

useful ideas which are not true. For instance, one counter-example which Moore
gives against (4) is that of someone lying to a "party of savages, who wish to make a
night attack and massacre a party of Europeans but are deceived as to the position in
which the Europeans are encamped. It is surely plain that such a false idea is
sometimes useful" (Moore, 1922, p. 113).
Now the question is the following. Are Moore and James using the term 'utility'
in the same sense?
The answer is no. Moore is using 'utility' in its usual and commonplace usage.
Thus, the equation of truth and utility, which he assumed James to hold, fails to
reconcile with common sense. What Moore considered to be wrong-headed in
James's account is its departure from the common-sense view or "the popular notion
of truth" as James calls it. However, when James recognised the need to overhaul the
concept of truth, the notion he had in mind was precisely the common-sense view of
copying. In several places, he declared his rejection of the common-sense notion of
truth for being "the absolutely empty notion of a static relation of 'correspondence' ...
between our minds and reality" (James, 1975a, p. 39). He proposed instead an
alternative analysis of truth that relates to the developments in science and scientific
method at the time which James sought to apply to truth. Thus James's analysis of
truth cannot justifiably be judged by Moore's substitution of his own common-sense
notion of utility for James's.
It has been argued that James's usage of the term 'utility' departs from the
common-sense usage. The pragmatic meaning of this term requires exploration. A
start can be made by citing one of the widely known quotations, which has been
taken by many critics as summarising James's notion of truth.

'The true, ' to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our
thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.
Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the
whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won't
necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as
we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present
formulas (James, 1975a, p. 106).

The main point emphasised in this passage is the existence of a relationship of some
sort between truth and expediency which has already been detailed in the previous
pages of his sixth lecture on Pragmatism (James, 1975a, pp. 95-113). Let us see how
James arrived at these statements.
If we are to grasp fully the meaning of the agreement of an idea with reality,
James argues, we must follow the pragmatic approach.

Pragmatism ... asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or beliefto be true," it
says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual
life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from
40 MAJEDAOMAR

those which would obtain ifthe belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's
cash-value in experiential terms?"
The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: 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. This thesis is what I have to defend (James, 1975a, p. 97).

Thus, the concrete difference that a true idea makes is that it can be verified or
validated. The verification-process of an idea is the fundamental process which leads
towards other "vital satisfactions" (James, 1975a, p. 97). James does not talk here
about useful ideas leading us satisfactorily towards other parts of experience as
verified ones do. True ideas derive their practical value, such as utility, from the
practical significance of their objects to us (James, 1975a, p. 98). Thus, true ideas
which are useful at one time may not remain so at all times or may become harmful
at some other time. That explains, James tells us, the value of having a "general
stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible situations" (James,
1975a, p. 98). This stock of beliefs is comprised of verified truths which are
practically irrelevant at times but which might be relevant in the future.
In science, James tells us, "we must find a theory that will wor/i'. What does that
mean? James writes:

that means something extremely difficult; for our theory must mediate
between all previous truths and certain new experiences. It must derange
common sense and previous belief as little as possible, and it must lead to
some sensible terminus or other that can be verified exactly. To 'work' means
both these things (James, 1975a, p. 104).

Here he states two conditions that must be satisfied if a scientific theory is to work.
This he extends to the conditions of determining the truth of any idea. The second
condition reflects his commitment to phenomenalism. The true idea must terminate
in sensible percepts which can be verified. The first condition reflects James's
commitment to a version of holism, which is not restricted to scientific beliefs only.
For James, beliefs are not tested individually but holistically. A new belief of any
kind is tested in conjunction with one's previously held beliefs. If it is accepted, it is
expected to have caused the least possible modification to one's originally held stock
of beliefs. James recognised, for example, that the belief in the Absolute might be
useful in the sense of securing a kind of 'moral holiday'. He rejected it, nevertheless,
on the grounds that it does not cohere with his stock of previously held beliefs. This
point is clearly stated in the following:

[T]he greatest enemy of anyone of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
Truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and of
desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them. My belief in the Absolute,
 JAMES'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH 41

based on the good it does me, must run the gauntlet of all my other beliefs.
Grant that it may be true in giving me a moral holiday. Nevertheless, as I
conceive it ... it clashes with other truths of mine whose benefits I hate to give
up on its account (James, 1975a, p. 43).

To conclude this discussion of utility, it seems that what James means by a true
idea working is not quite the same as the views which Moore ascribes to him in his
well-known paper on James's Pragmatism (Moore, 1922, pp. 97-146).

JAMES AND A.J.AYER

Ayer rightly observes that some of James's statements about truth could neither be
reconciled easily with one another nor with our ordinary conception of truth (Ayer,
1968, p. 197). Nevertheless, it is possible, in his view, to construct a tenable theory
from these statements on the basis of the following interpretation.
Ayer argues that James accepted that truth consists of the agreement of an idea
with reality, but he found this definition 'uninformative' (Ayer, 1968, p. 199). It is
uninformative because it does not assist one in deciding which propositions to
accept. James's answer to the question 'How can I decide what propositions to
accept?' was that "a proposition is to be accepted if and only if it works" (Ayer,
1968, p. 199). Accordingly, James's thesis was about the conditions under which a
proposition is to be accepted. James's thesis was not only about truth but also about
acceptability.
In Ayer's view, James did not hold that the criteria of acceptability are the same
for all propositions. There are different criteria of acceptability corresponding to the
different kinds of propositions. Thus James divides propositions, Ayer argues, into
three different classes: the class of propositions which are concerned with relations
of ideas, the class of propositions which are concerned with matters of facts, and the
class of propositions which satisfy our moral requirements. These criteria of
acceptability differ according to the different functions performed by the different
kinds of propositions (Ayer, 1968, p. 196).
James was mistaken, Ayer argues, in not drawing attention to these distinctions
which he made implicitly. And this contributed to the misunderstanding that
surrounded his position. Thus, Ayer thinks that commentators on James have gone
wrong in thinking that James did apply to all kinds of propositions the criterion
which James actually applied only to propositions belonging to the third class, i.e., to
those propositions which satisfy our moral and religious needs. For only propositions
of the third class are to be accepted, if and only if it satisfies us to believe them
(Ayer, 1968, p. 223).
Hence, Ayer regards Moore's serious objections as "so obvious that it is hard to
understand how James could have remained unmoved by them if he really held the
views against which they were directed" (Ayer, 1968, p. 198). Moore's objections
are fatal to the claim that beliefs are true, if and only if they work. However, if one
takes into consideration the fact that the criteria of acceptability are not the same for
42 MAJEDAOMAR

all kinds of propositions, then the claim that beliefs are true, if and only ifthey work,
could be made tenable (Ayer, 1968, p. 201).
Now the question is: Did James really apply subjective criteria only to
propositions of the third class, that of moral and religious propositions? The answer
is no. Reviewing what James had said about truth in science, he held that subjective
factors such as simplicity, usefulness, taste and elegance are applied when deciding
which scientific formulae to accept. The selection between competing formulae or
descriptions, when the method of reduction is not applicable, is based on such
subjective factors. James puts forward this point in the following:

The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our
formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal 'objectivity,' as in
subjective qualities like its usefulness, its 'elegance' or its congruity with our
residual beliefs (James, 1975b, p. 41).

In Pragmatism, he emphasises the same point by claiming that:

Truth in science is what gives us the maximum possible sum of satisfactions,

taste included, but consistency both with previous truth and with novel fact is
always the most imperious claimant (James, 1975a, p. 104).

We should be clear how these different factors operate in the process of choosing
between different scientific formulae. First of all, the condition of consistency must
be satisfied. The scientific formula that we accept must be consistent with our
previously held beliefs about scientific facts. Second, subjective factors are only
applied when we cannot decide on empirical and logical grounds which formula to
accept. All these criteria operate together in the process of deciding which beliefs to
accept, beliefs of any kind whatsoever. James makes this point in a letter to R. B.
Perry, dated August 4, 1907, where he complains about being misunderstood by his
critics.

My position is that, other things equal, emotional satisfactions count for truth
- among the other things being the intellectual satisfactions. Certainly a
doctrine that encouraged immortality would draw belief more than one that
didn't, if it were exactly as satisfactory in residual respects. Of course it
couldn't prevail against knock-down evidence to the contrary; but where there
is no such evidence, it will incline belief (Perry, 1935, p. 475).

James reiterates this point.

[TJ hey quote me as saying that anything morally satisfactory can be treated as
true, no matter how unsatisfactory it may be from the point of view of its
consistency with what we already know or believe to be true about physical or
natural facts. Which is rot!! (Perry, 1935, p. 468).
 JAMES'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH 43

Hence, from among different competing formulae which are logically equivalent and
which also satisfy the condition of consistency, the simpler and the more elegant one
is to be preferred. This is quite different from saying that we accept scientific
formulae as true because it satisfies us to do so. James's application of the same
criteria to all kinds of beliefs is based on his view of scientific beliefs as not different
in kind from religious and moral ones. Thus, they do not fit neatly into the three
classes, where the division is based on the different methods of verifying them.
Ayer's interpretation is tailored to defend James against the charge of applying
subjective criteria to all kinds of beliefs, and especially to scientific ones, by denying
that James did actually make this application.

JAMES AND F. H. BRADLEY

F. H. Bradley held, at one stage, a coherence view of truth which fits neatly with his
idealistic metaphysics. Truth, in Bradley's view, is identified with an individual, all-
inclusive and appropriately connected systematic coherent whole. Members of this
system are mental items to which he refers as judgements. Every judgement is
subject to the test of whether or not it fits within a complete system of those beliefs
which have already been accepted. Bradley characterises this test as follows:

The test which I advocate is the idea of a whole of knowledge as wide and as
consistent as may be. In speaking of system I mean always the union of these
two aspects, and this is the sense and the only sense in which I am defending
coherence (Bradley, 1914, p. 202).

Hence, Bradley is not merely concerned with the coherence between beliefs, but
also with their comprehensiveness. The true set of beliefs, he argues, must include
both maximum coherence and maximum comprehensiveness. These two characters
are not two irreducible principles but two complementary aspects of a single
principle (Bradley, 1914, p. 223). Bradley thinks that reality is both coherent and
comprehensive. The degree to which our theories can become closer to identity with
reality depends largely on their degree of coherence and comprehensiveness.
However, this type of truth, truths for ordinary purposes, should not aspire to a
correspondence with reality, they can only establish systems of beliefs which are for
various tasks more or less pragmatically useful. The kind of truth which seems to be
appropriate for this identity is absolute truth which aims at grasping the real essence
of reality and which comes nearer to a correspondence with reality in its ultimate
nature.
Thus, we see Bradley attacking, on the level of ordinary judgements, 'the copy
theory of truth' in any of its forms because "[t]o copy is to reproduce in some other
existence more or less of the character of an object which is before your mind"
(Bradley, 1911, pp. 331-332). This assumes that reality is independent of knowledge
and of truth. "The moment that truth, knowledge, and reality are taken as separate,"
Bradley argues, "there is no way in which consistently they can come or be forced
44 MAJEDAOMAR

together" (Bradley, 1914, p. 110). By accepting truth as consisting of copying fact,

reality is made external to thought and it is difficult to see how they can be
connected again. Another objection which Bradley raises against this theory is that if
truth is taken to copy fact then,

the facts to be copied show already in their nature the work of truth-making.
The merely given facts are, in other words, the imaginary creatures of false
theory. They are manufactured by a mind which abstracts one aspect of the
concrete known whole, and sets this abstracted aspect out by itself as a real
thing (Bradley, 1914, p. 108).

In Bradley's view, we never experience reality as it is in itself. Considering that the

knower is a transformer of experience, it can hardly be maintained that what is really
experienced are the facts as they are in themselves. Bradley resolved this difficulty
of the separation between reality and thOUght by the identification of truth,
knowledge and reality.
After a brief examination of the main features of Bradley's views on truth, it is
appropriate to tum to discussion of some of his main criticisms of the pragmatic
theory of truth. Bradley was not entirely certain what the pragmatic theory of truth
was actually affirming (Bradley, 1914, p. 127). He argued that if truth is regarded
merely as a matter of the practical success of ideas, then one must be clear on what is
precisely meant by 'practical success' if one is to have a grasp of what truth means
pragmatically. If the practical success of ideas was established very broadly, then
what this theory is claiming seems to be trivially true and barely revolutionary. The
successful working of ideas could be the result of the correspondence between ideas
and facts. If success is understood narrowly, then the theory does not seem to be
correct, for an idea could be false, but remain useful.
"[W]herever the word truth has its meaning," Bradley says, "that meaning to me
cannot be reduced to bare practical effect" (Bradley, 1904, p. 311). He admits that
the successful working of ideas can be regarded as a criterion for determining their
truth. At some unreflective stage, the mind only accepts ideas which work
practically. But even if these practical workings are the closest we can get to truth,
one cannot allow that the essence of truth lies totally in such working ideas. Bradley
agrees that the truth of ordinary judgements is a pragmatic truth in terms of their
utility and intellectual satisfaction. This is not, he argues, truth itself.

I agree that any idea which in any way 'works', has in some sense truth. Only
to my mind it has not on this account ultimate truth (Bradley, 1914, p. 123).

Bradley contrasts this type of truth, that of working ideas, to a deeper kind of truth
which he calls absolute truth. He maintains that truth has degrees and at the highest is
that which constitutes the essence of truth, an absolute truth which he opposes to
lower types of truth, to which the pragmatic criteria of assessment are applied in the
determination of the truth of ideas.
 JAMES'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH 45

For Bradley, when dealing with working ideas for which we claim no final truth,
we should choose those which work best for the current task without paying much
attention to their internal consistency with other ideas. Thus, he criticised James's
emphasis on the consistency between and within our beliefs (Bradley, 1914, p. 67).
For James, the criterion of consistency within one's system of beliefs of any kind is a
crucial component of his theory of truth. As we have discussed earlier, James accepts
any belief as true, if and only if it coheres with 'other truths' that constitute his total
system of beliefs or if it is likely to cause a minimal change to that system.
Both Bradley and James distinguish between pragmatic truth and absolute truth.
However, each characterised the latter differently. In Pragmatism, James writes:

The 'absolutely' true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is
that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary
truths will some day converge (James, 1975a, pp. 106-7).

Let us take the case of scientific truths and see if this concept of absolute truth,
thus defmed, applies. The convergence that seems to be in James's mind is that of
successive theories converging towards one final theory. The occurrence of such a
possibility seems to fly in the face of James's views on science and scientific
theories. We have mentioned earlier that James held that any given phenomenon can
be equally accounted for by more than one scientific theory, that subjective factors
playa role in choosing among competing theories. Thus, scientific theories are not
literally objective. They do not depict reality literally, as was commonly held. James
tells us that:

Up to about 1850 almost everyone believed that sciences expressed truths that
were exact copies of a defmite code of non-human realities. But the
enormously rapid multiplication of theories in these latter days has well-nigh
upset the notion of anyone of them being a more literally objective kind of
thing than another. There are so many geometries, so many logics, so many
physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each one of them
good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the notion that even
the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has
dawned upon us (James, 1975b, p. 40).

Philosophy, James tells us, had followed the path of science in its quest for the
'absolutely' true. Thus, the widely accepted view of truth was that of copying. True
ideas copy the realities to which they refer literally. It has been said earlier that the
notion of truth as copying was the notion to which James had proposed his pragmatic
conception of truth as an alternative. He believed that philosophy cannot be blind to
the developments in science which have changed the way we conduct our dealings
with reality. He says that:
46 MAJEDAOMAR

the enonnous growth of the sciences in the past fifty years has reconciled us
to the idea that "Not quite true" is as near as we can ever get. For
investigating minds there is no sanctity in any theory (James, 1987, p. 551).

Thus has emerged the view that there exists a multiplicity of fonnulae that may
account for the same physical phenomenon, that facts are always interpreted from a
particular point of view. But, if James is reporting and applauding these
developments in science that resulted in abandoning the search for absolute truth, it
becomes almost impossible to square his views on the plurality of truth with his view
of an absolute truth to which all relative truths may one day converge.

JAMES AND T. L. S. SPRIGGE

Let us now tum to discussing an important aspect of James's theory of truth, namely,
his treatment of the relation between thought and its object. It has been argued above
that James had rejected the copy theory of truth and replaced it by a view of truth
according to which certain workings of an idea constitute truth. The fact that James
had abandoned the notion that thought is a mere duplicate of reality makes it
essential that he provide an account of how our ideas 'know' their realities. We shall
now discuss James's account of how an idea refers to its object.
Some commentators such as T. L. S. Sprigge and H. S. Thayer argued that
James's account of 'aboutness' was largely a response to Josiah Royce's challenging
proof of the existence of God or the Absolute (Sprigge, 1997, p. 135). Accordingly,
to understand James's account of truth, it becomes necessary to examine how
James's view of the relation between thought and its object was fonnulated in
opposition to Royce's absolutism.
Royce argued that the admission of the indubitable existence of error implies the
necessary existence of an absolute mind which includes everything. Error is,
according to Royce:

an incomplete thought, that to a higher thought, which includes it and its

intended object, is known as having failed in the purpose that it more or less
clearly had, and that is fully realized in this higher thought. And without such
higher inclusive thought, an assertion has no external object, and is no error
(Royce, 1969, p. 347).

Thus, the possibility of error depends on a false thought being contained in a more
inclusive thought which is included in the absolute mind of which our fmite minds
are only fragments. On this account, my idea encounters the object of which it is
about directly. Thus the relation between thought and its object becomes a
"distinctively mental type of directedness on the Absolute's part" (Sprigge, 1997, p.
134) which should make the reference to our ideas intelligible.
James took Royce's argument very seriously and tended to think that Royce had
proved the existence of the Absolute. However, James was struggling to find an
 JAMES'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH 47

alternative and empirical account of the relation between a thought and its object
which would explain how errors arise and would escape the postulation of an
absolute mind. James's alternative account was put forward in his article "The
Function of Cognition", published in 1885, in which he argued that an idea can only
have a definite meaning and reference, if and only if it is sufficiently helpful in
preparing us for encounters with some object that it is about. Sprigge interprets
James as claiming that the meaning and reference of any idea are determined by
certain conditions which must be satisfied if the idea is to encourage the successful
behaviour and to promote fruitful dealings with reality (Sprigge, 1993, p. 59). Thus,
the truth of thought does not consist in a certain relation of correspondence or some
form of copying between a thought and an object which exists independently of it; it,
rather, consists in the fact that thoughts are more likely to put one into behavioural
relations with their objects which are satisfactory and useful (Sprigge, 1997, p. 136).
As for the case of error, Sprigge explains that:

an idea will be false if there is no such object as it is fitted to put us into

satisfactory relations with, either because there is no such object to be
engaged with in a manner prompted by the idea, or because such object as
there is lacks essential features required if that engagement with it is to be
successful (Sprigge, 1997, p. 136).

James has given an empirical account of how to account for error without
postulating an absolute mind. It seems appropriate in the course of this discussion to
examine closely James's and Royce's positions with regard to the absolute or infmite
mind. In his The Meaning afTruth, James points out that:

The transcendental idealist thinks that, in some inexplicable way, the finite
states of mind are identical with the transfinite all-knower which he finds
himself obliged to postulate in order to supply afundamentum for the relation
of knowing, as he apprehends it. Pragmatists can leave the question of
identity open; but they cannot do without the wider knower any more than
they can do without the reality, if they want to prove a case of knowing. They
themselves play the part of the absolute knower for the universe of discourse
which serves them as material for epistemologizing (James, 1975b, p. 114).

Unlike the transcendental idealist, the pragmatist neither identifies the thought with
the reality it is about, nor does he hold that to know a reality an idea must possess
that reality. James says that:

For pragmatism this kind of coalescence is inessential. As a rule our

cognitions are only processes of mind off their balance and in motion towards
real termini; and the reality of the termini, believed in by the states of mind in
question, can be guaranteed only by some wider knower (James, 1975b, p.
114).
48 MAJEDAOMAR

Both James and Royce posited a wider knower, that is, a more inclusive mind, which
accounts for the knower's claim to knowledge. However, they disagreed on the
actual characterisation of the nature of this wider knower. For Royce, the wider
knower is identified with an infinite mind which guarantees that our ideas know their
objects. James also admits that in order to account for the relation of knowledge, a
wider knower must be postulated. He holds, however, that within the limits of our
experience, we can offer an explanation for our erroneous beliefs without appealing
to an infinite mind. Thus, the wider knower according to the pragmatist's view need
not be identified with an infinite mind.
Absolute idealists, such as Bradley and Sprigge, will find James's theory of truth
incomplete. Sprigge, for example, agrees with James that an idea may be true in a
pragmatic sense whereby it guides us to behaviour towards its object. However,
Sprigge argues that we do in fact possess ideas which are true in a non-pragmatic
sense. For this reason, a distinction ought to be drawn between two types of truths:
pragmatic truths and literal truths (Sprigge, 1993, p. 64). Bradley, as we have seen
already, did raise a similar objection to James's pragmatic truths.
The concept of literal truth is central to Sprigge' s version of absolute idealism. It
is beyond the scope of this paper to examine Sprigge's metaphysical system, which
has been detailed in his The Vindication of Absolute Idealism. What is interesting
here is the contrast that he draws between pragmatic truth and literal truth. For
Sprigge, to attain a genuine understanding of how things really are one should have a
grasp of literal truth. Literal truth, he says, "is possessed by one who captures within
his own mind or imagination something of the essence of the reality onto which his
thought is somehow directed" (Sprigge, 1996, pp. 82-83). Pragmatic truth is helpful
for individuals in coping with reality fruitfully without providing a genuine grasp of
its actual character to the mind. Thus, pragmatic truth, which James had argued for,
is in Sprigge's view, suitable for ordinary purposes only. Though he shares with
James his quest for knowing how things really are, Sprigge thinks that a
metaphysician would not be satisfied with knowing pragmatic truth only. And, thus,
he postulates literal truth as the kind of truth that the metaphysician seeks. Whether
or not this kind of truth is achievable is another question (Sprigge, 1996, p. 83).

CONCLUDING REMARKS

After an examination of different responses to James's theory of truth, comes the

major interest of clarifying some points to which his critics have raised objections. A
summary of the positions of James's critics follows and there is a brief remark in
conclusion.
The different responses to James's views on truth reflect the various aspects of
his theory some of which were highlighted during this discussion. James's view of
truth, which clearly departs from common sense was attacked severely by Moore for
its failure to reconcile with common sense. In the preface to The Meaning of Truth,
Moore features in a list of critics who seemed to James to "labor under an inability
 JAMES'S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH 49

almost pathetic, to understand the thesis which they seek to refute" (James, 1975b, p.
10). Bradley was not included in this list.
As has been shown, the correspondence theory of truth was certainly not
Bradley's favourite view. He had a deeper commitment to a view of truth that takes
both coherence and comprehensiveness as its criteria. For Bradley, reality is given
only in experience. However, the form in which it is given lacks coherence and
comprehensiveness. Hence, it is our job to transform the data of experience into a
coherent and comprehensive form. Bradley distinguished between different types of
truth on the basis of his identification of truth with reality and knowledge and his
doctrine that truth and reality have degrees. Accordingly, judgements can be either
literally true or pragmatically true according to the degree of truth they actually
possess. Thus, one can see why he regarded James's theory of truth as incomplete.
Truth, Bradley held, cannot be reduced to bare practical effect. Truth has a practical
essence but its whole essence is not practical. On the basis of this distinction between
pragmatic truths and literal truths, Sprigge also considered James's theory as
unsatisfactory. Pragmatic truths, he argued, do not capture the whole essence of
truth. There must be a deeper kind of truth, which he calls literal truth.
However, Ayer who regards the problem of truth as simply fictitious does not
share the keen interest among metaphysicians such as Bradley and Sprigge, to grasp
the literal truth about reality. Ayer regarded the predicates 'true' and 'false' as
redundant and thus eliminable, suggesting that all we should be seeking in
approaching the problem of truth is criteria of the validity of statements. Thus he
found the correspondence theory confused. He rejected Bradley's theory of truth
primarily on the basis of its connection with his metaphysical system and the
doctrine of internal relations which he rejects. James's theory held more appeal for
Ayer than any of the other traditional theories of truth because of the verificationist
thread in James's pragmatism. Ayer saw James's pragmatic method as if it were a
kind of verifiability criterion of meaning and/or meaningfulness. On Ayer's
interpretation of James's theory of truth, however, James is more likely to emerge as
a logical positivist than a pragmatist.
What seems to be most interesting about James's theory of truth is its providing
an alternative analysis of truth that relates to the developments of science and
scientific method of his day. Whether he succeeded in accomplishing this goal is an
open question that deserves further exploration.

University ofEdinburgh

REFERENCES.
Ayer, A. J.: 1968, The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and
William James, London, Macmillan.
Bradley, F. H.: 1904, 'On Truth and Practice', Mind 13,309-335.
Bradley, F. H.: 1911, 'On Some Aspects of Truth', Mind 20, 305-341.
Bradley, F. H.: 1914, Essays on Truth and Reality, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
James, W.: 1975a, Pragmatism, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
50 MAJEDAOMAR

James, W.: 1975b, The Meaning of Truth, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
James, W.: 1987, Essays, Comments, and Reviews, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.
Moore, G. E.: 1922, Philosophical Studies, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Moore, G. E.: 1965, Some Main Problems of Philosophy, London, George Allen & Unwin.
Perry, R. B.: 1935, The Thought and Character of William James: As revealed in unpublished
correspondence and notes, together with his published writings, vol. II, London, Humphrey Milford,
Oxford University Press.
Royce, J.: 1969, The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, vol. I, edited with an introduction by John. J.
McDermott, Chicago, The University 0: Chicago Press.
Sprigge, T. L. S.: 1983, The Vindication of Absolute idealism, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.
Sprigge, T. L. S.: 1993, James & Bradley: American Truth and British Reality, Chicago, Open Court
Publishing Company.
Sprigge, T. L. S.: 1996, 'Absolute Idealism', Philosophical Writings 2,82-97.
Sprigge, T. L. S.: 1997, 'James, aboutness, and his British critics' in The Cambridge Companion to
William James, edited by Ruth Anna Putnam, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 125-144.
 JAN WOLEN-SKI

SEMANTIC CONCEPTION OF TRUTH

AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY

I consider the question 'do we philosophers (epistemologists, etc.) need a theory of

truth?' ridiculous. Questions like this are applicable to practically any other
philosophical problem: do we philosophers need a theory of perception, value, mind,
etc? In fact, it is very difficult to defend the view that we need this or that
philosophical theory. I restrict myself to the following confession: the basic stock of
philosophical problems arose in ancient Greece. These problems have been
elaborated by philosophers, more or less successfully, until now. It happens that
some problems disappear, but others reappear or even appear as new. Yet some
problems are fairly constant over the course of history. The problem of truth
certainly has belonged to philosophical invariants, at least since Aristotle. It was
reinterpreted by almost every generation of philosophers, sometimes with new
insights. We philosophers are obliged, in a sense, to look at old problems from our
perspective. I do not claim that semantics is the only contemporary perspective for
the theory of truth, but certainly it produces a way of speaking on language and its
relation to the world. So much for the general explanation of the title of this paper.
Russell (see Russell, 1912) stated a set of constraints for any theory pretending to
be the theory of truth: (a) the theory of truth must also explain the nature of falsity;
(b) truth must be taken as a property of beliefs; (c) truth is an external relativn of
belief to something existing outside it. These conditions say too much on the one
hand, but too little on the other. Too much, because (b) and (c) exclude - in advance
and somehow a priori - some important ideas. The requirement (b) ignores other
accounts of truth bearers, and (c), selecting the correspondence theory, automatically
rejects theories which consider truth as consisting in relations between judgments
without making any reference to the external world; thus, (c) excludes the coherence
theory. On the other hand, Russell's constraints are too weak. For example, if one
says that truth consists in evidence of beliefs, one also offers an account which
satisfies (c). In general, the conditions (b )-(c) are unfair to the richness of problems
usually investigated by truth-theories. Any philosophical truth-theory which intends
to be historically faithful should touch many other questions. Without pretending to
completeness, I list the following:

(d) Is truth an epistemological or ontological or perhaps even axiological

concept?

51
1. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), 51-65.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
52 JAN WOLENSKI

(e) What are the bearers of truth?

(t) Ifwe select a kind of truth-bearers as generic, are all instances of this category
of bearers of truth (for example, if we select sentences or even propositions, what
about interrogatives, exclamations, evaluations, norms, etc.)?
(g) What is a truth-criterion and what about the relation of truth-criteria and truth-
defmition?
(h) If we classify truth-bearers into true and false, is this division exhaustive and
disjoint (are there values apart from truth and falsity or perhaps are there other truth-
falsity-value gaps)?
(j) Is this division stable, that is, do at least some truth-bearers sometimes change
their truth-values (briefly: is truth relative or absolute)?
(k) What is the relation of a particular truth-theory to its rivals and how does it
answer objections issued by advocates of other theories?
(1) What is the relation of truth to other philosophical problems, such as realism
and anti-realism, to take a quite contemporary example?
(m) How is truth related to logic?

As we see, there is a lot to do for a theory of truth. I will try to show how the
semantic conception of truth is related to these questions, or at least to some of them.
I regard this theory as a kind of the so-called correspondence theory of truth.
However, one remark is very crucial here. It is very common to say something like:
the correspondence theory of truth originated with Aristotle (perhaps Plato), was
dressed by the Schoolmen in a nice formula veritas est adequatio rei et intellectus,
criticized by Kant, rejected by Frege and Bradley, reinterpreted by Brentano (who
criticized the adequatio formula), revived by Russell and Wittgenstein, perhaps
reinterpreted by Tarski, replaced by the minimal theory by Horwich, criticized by
Dummett, first accepted but then rejected by Davidson, etc. This story is quite
remote from historical correctness (see Wolenski, 1994). First of alI, Aristotle never
used any label being a counterpart of 'correspondence'. The term adequatio
appeared in the Middle Ages, but its history is too complicated to be described here
(more than three hundred years passed from Isaac Israeli to Thomas Aquinas).
Anyway, Aristotle used several descriptions of truth. Perhaps the most important are:
"to say 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, and of what is not that it is not, is true" (Metaphysics 1011 b); "[ ... ] he who
thinks the separated to be separated and the combined as combined has the truth,
while he whose thought is in a state contrary to that of the objects is in error"
(Metaphysics 1051 b). The first problem is whether the formulations are equivalent
or not? The term 'correspondence' appeared no earlier than in the 19th century (see
Wolenski, 1994b). Samuel Coleridge was the first to use it, but quite incidentally.
Then this term appeared in Bradley and Russell. The name 'correspondence theory
of truth' was first used in Baldwin (1901-1905). Harold Joachim (1906) used the
label 'the correspondence-notion of truth' and applied it to the second of Aristotle's
quoted formulations, completely neglecting the first one. Unfortunately, I must
refrain from further historical remarks, but I think that even this brief excursion into
 TARSKI'S THEORY OF TRUTH AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 53

history gives us a sufficient evidence that two concepts of correspondence should be

distinguished (Wolenski, 1993): the weak, associated with the first of Aristotle's
formulations, and the strong, perhaps associated with the second one; I say 'perhaps'
because we do not know Aristotle's original view of how the formulations were
related. The distinction between weak and strong correspondence follows the
distinction between correspondence as correlation and correspondence as
congruence (Pitcher, 1964). I will argue that the semantic conception of truth gives
an account of the concept of weak corresponence as contrasted with the concept of
strong correspondence considered as a structural similarity (congruence) of truth
bearers and facts. Russell and Wittgenstein offered accounts of strong
correspondence, and perhaps Aristotle's second formulation could be put into this
tradition: a combination or separation of subject and predicate in a sentence mirrors
the real combination and separation of ousia and accident in the substance.
Several, more or less fundamental, objections were stated against the
correspondence theory of truth (CTT):

(I) (CTT) gives no reasonable account of truth-criteria;

(II) The concept of correspondence is void or at least unclear;
(III) The slingshot argument;
(IV) (CTT) falls into regressus ad infinitum;
(V) Troubles with negative truth-bearers;
(VI) Troubles with truths of logic and mathematics.

Let me briefly explain these objections, which are not independent in some respects.
Re (I): This objection was first stated by the sceptics who criticized the
dogmatists for their view that truth was graspable. Although the dogmatists at that
time used the correspondence, or rather classical, theory of truth, the sceptical
argumentation was intended against any theory of truth, because they tried to prove
that no reasonable (valid) criterion of truth is possible. A more particular
argumentation against truth-criteria based on the correspondence theory of truth is
this. A criterion has to consist in comparison of truth-bearers and reality. It is
possible to compare truth-bearers with other truth-bearers or pieces of reality with
other pieces of reality, but it is impossible to compare truth-bearers with pieces of
reality. As a matter of fact, these problems were also discussed by the sceptics on the
occasion of their criticism of the stoic view on the corporality of what is true, and the
incorporality of truth itself. According to Kant, a comparison of truth-bearers with
their real counterparts is an obvious absurdity, because the object of knowledge is
constructed by reason.
Re (II): What is correspondence? Kant's view on the impossibility of any
comparison of truth-bearers with reality implies that the concept of correspondence
is void, because reality in itself is outside the scope of our epistemic capacities. This
position was continued by Jacob Friedrich Fries who maintained that we could
compare given knowledge with another piece of knowledge (going back to
immediate experience), but not with the reality. For Bradley, reality as the Whole is
54 JAN waLEN-sKI

the only item which is actually independent of knowledge, but particular facts are
constructed by our epistemic devices. Thus, correspondence between truth-bearers
and facts is pointless. Eventually, we can speak about correspondence between the
Knowledge and Reality as Wholes, but this is a rather trivial observation. Since
Kant, Fries and Bradley used their own epistemology and ontology in their criticism,
this way is weak to some extent, because it is dependent on assumptions that are not
evident. However, a stronger criticism of the correspondence relation also appeared.
It was observed (Schlick, 1974, 61-62) that correspondence could be interpreted
either as identity or as similarity. However, both interpretations are wrong: the fact
that snow is white is neither identical nor similar to the proposition (sentence,
statement, thought, judgement) that snow is white. In order to solve this problem he
proposed his notion of correspondence as correlation (unique designation). Other
attempts to solve the problem consisted in analyzing the correspondence relation via
isomorphism, homomorphism or structural similarity, but these concepts, literally
applicable to abstract mathematical structures, are only metaphors outside their
proper domains.
Re (III): It is rather obvious that the truth-bearer 'snow is white' corresponds to a
different fact than the truth-bearer 'grass is green'. However, the correspondence
theory leads to a conclusion that every truth-bearer corresponds to the same Great
Fact. Bradley and Frege rooted this argument in their ontological theories. For
Bradley every particular truth-bearer is a fragment of the Great Unity of Knowledge
to which it is extendible and thereby it corresponds with another Great Unity, namely
the Reality. For Frege, since every true truth-bearer refers to Truth, all true truth-
bearers have to correspond to the same Entity. This objection is sometimes proved
independently of such particular views, for example by Davidson, and it is known as
the slingshot argument.
Re (IV): This is a very interesting objection. Assume that truth consists in
correspondence with something else. Now consider the sentence 'A is true'. If A is
true, then A corresponds with something. But to assert that A is true, we must use a
sentence 'A is true' which also requires the correspondence relation. Now, in order to
say this, we must use the sentence 'the sentence 'A is true' is true'. And so on. This
talk falls into regressus ad infinitum. The same can be expressed by saying that a
third observer is always required in order to justify the relation between truth-bearers
and something else. This objection was stated independently by Bradley and
Brentano.
Re (V): Assume that the correspondence theory is applied to negative sentences,
in particular to negative existentials, for example the sentence 'Pegasus does not
exist'. However, if Pegasus does not exist the following question arises: what does
correspond to a true truth-bearer 'Pegasus does not exist'? This difficulty was
observed by Brentano. There is its more general version. Assume that I say 'London
is not the capital of France'. It is a true negative sentence which is logically
equivalent neither to 'London is the capital of England' nor 'Paris is the capital of
France'. The solution seems to require negative facts, which lead to an excessively
 TARSKl'S THEORY OF TRUTH AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 55

rich ontology, for some purists. The same concerns universally quantified
truth-bearers and general facts.
Re (VI): This objection was also raised by Brentano, who argued that all
theorems of logic and mathematics can be reduced to negative existentials (as purely
general). Thus, he reduced this objection to that which was noted in the previous
section. However, if someone wants to have the correspondence theory governed by
the requirement that truth-bearers correspond with specific facts, one has problems
with theorems of logic and mathematics as corresponding with arbitrary facts. I will
argue that some of these objections are applicable only to the strong correspondence
theory, but the semantic conception of truth gives satisfactory answers to others. This
is the reason for attributing a philosophical significance to it.
The semantic conception of truth consists of several interconnected ideas. The
most important are:

(A) a view about a relation between truth and meaning: the truth definition is
given for interpreted languages;
(B) a diagnosis of semantic paradoxes;
(C) a way out of semantic paradoxes;
CD) T-scheme;
(E) material and formal conditions of truth definition, in particular the
convention (T);
(F) the condition imposed on metalanguage in order to obtain the truth
definition; metalanguage must be essentially richer than object language;
(G) truth definition itself;
(H) bivalence is a consequence of the definition;
(I) a theorem that the set of truth for a language L is a maximal consistent set;
(K) the undefmability theorem: the truth-predicate is undefinable in languages
sufficient for elementary arithmetic.

Perhaps (H) requires some further explanation, because some authors

(Pogorzelski, 1994, p. 275, p. 406, Goran Sundholm during the discussion of the
present paper) argue that bivalence follows from the semantic definition of truth, due
to the fact that we use classical logic in the metalanguage in which the definition is
formulated. If that is so, they continue, (H) becomes a trivial consequence of the
assumed logic and has no interesting philosophical content. I will argue against this
qualification. Our concern is the formula

(1) for any A, TA v FA,

which expresses the principle of bivalence (PB) and says that every sentence is either
true or false. The conceptual situation, independently of any concrete truth-
definition, can be summarized by the following diagram:
56 JAN WOLENSKI

Let a = TA, P = T-.A, Y= .T.A, 0 = .TA, c = TA v T-,A, and <p = .T.A I\.TA.
We have the following logical relationships, valid for any A:

(2) (a) TA => • T -,A;

(b) -,(TA 1\ T.A);
(c) T(.A) => .TA;
(d) -,T.A v • TA;
(e) -,(TA <=>-,TA);
(f) • (-, T.A <=> T -,A).

Falsity does not occur directly in our scheme. There are two candidates to
represent FA, namely T-,A and .TA. Intuitively, (PB) does not distinguish between
them. Ifwe prove

(3) T -.A <=> • TA,

we have also

(4) .T-.A <=>TA.

Now, having (3) and (4), we can justify (PB) via (2d), accepting

(5) FA <=> -,TA <=> T-.A.

The same assumptions lead to the equivalence of (3d) with

 TARSKl'S THEORY OF TRUTH AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 57

(6) TA v T.A,

which is very often regarded as the basis for another formulation of (PB). However,
the universally quantified (6) is not directly provable from our logical square. Now
assume the T -scheme, that is

(7) TA <=>A.

Subsituting .A for A gives

(8) T .A <=> .A.

A simple manipulation of equivalence and negation leads to

(9) (a) ..., TA <=> ...,A

(b) ...,T.A <=>A.

In this way we obtain resources sufficient to prove (PB). As we can see, the T-
scheme plays the central role in the above argument. The situation described by <p
admits sentences which are neither true nor false, even within the framework of
classical logic. This means that we presumably can accept that there is a sentence A
such that..., TA 1\ ...,FA. Now assume that one proposes

(10) for any A, TA <=> VERIFA,

as the definition of truth, that is an explication of truth in terms of verifiability. In

this situation, (PB) is not provable, unless we exclude sentences which are both
unverifiable and unfalsifiable. Of course, we can do it and adopt

(11) VERIFA <=>A,

but this move either leads to

(12) for any A, ...,VERIFA <=>.A

which cancels everything that is interesting in the concept of truth as verifiability, or

it makes VERIFA only a conventional abbreviation for TA.
Until now I have said nothing about the logic used in the above argumentation,
except that the usual rules of the logical square were employed. Obviously, they are
a part of classical logic. However, considering (10) shows that this defmition does
not lead to (PB) even with classical logic. The T-scheme or something at least
equivalent is indispensable for proving bivalence. However, this means that classical
logic is not sufficient to produce (PB) and every construction which enrichs this
58 JAN WOLENSKI

logic in order to establish bivalence is philosophically nontrivial (see Woleilski,

1998, for a further discussion).
It is very important to see that the T-scheme (' A' is true if and only if A) is not a
definition of truth. The semantic definition regards truth as a special case of
satisfaction (satisfaction by all sequences of objects). Consider two stocks of ideas:

I. (GENERAL CASE): OPEN FORMULA, SA TISFACTION BY SOME OBJECTS

(SATISFACTION BY THOSE OBJECTS), NON-SATISFACTION BY SOME
OBJECTS, SATISFACTION (NON-SATISFACTION BY THOSE OBJECTS);
II. (SPECIAL CASE): CLOSED FORMULA (SENTENCE), SATISF ACTION BY
ALL OBJECTS (WHAT IS THIS?), SATISFACTION BY NO OBJECTS (WHAT
IS THIS?).

Traditionally: a (declarative) sentence is something that is true or false. Then it is

quite natural to insert truth and falsity in the place of the question marks in (II). We
even have the following proportions

OPEN FORMULA : SATISFACTION BY SOME OBJECTS

(SATISFACTION) = SENTENCE : SA TISF ACTION BY ALL OBJECTS
(TRUTH);
OPEN FORMULA : NON-SATISFACTION BY SOME OBJECTS
(NON-SATISFACTION BY THOSE OBJECTS) = SENTENCE SAT-
ISF ACTION BY NO OBJECT (FALSITY)

Thus the definition of truth as satisfaction of a sentence by all objects (for technical
reasons: satisfaction by all infinite sequences of objects) is an outcome of a very
elegant analogy.
There is a great deal of debate about whether it is a philosophical theory at all.
Tarski himself made remarks which were not quite consistent. He explictly said that
he tried to solve an epistemological problem, that he followed Aristotle, but also that
his theory was neutral with respect to several philosophical issues. The last point is
usually taken as evidence that the semantic conception was regarded by Tarski
himself as philosophically insignificant. A frequently quoted remark of Tarski's in
this direction is this: "[ ... ] we may accept the semantic conception of truth without
giving up any epistemological attitude we may have had: we may remain naive
realists, critical realists or idealists, empiricists or metaphysicians - whatever we
were before. The semantic conception is completely neutral toward all these issues"
(Tarski, 1944, 362). Earlier he said: "In general, I do not believe that there is such a
thing as "the philosophical problem of truth". I do believe that there are various
intelligible and interesting (but not necessarily philosophical) problems concerning
the notion of truth, but I also believe that they can be exactly formulated and
possibly solved only on the basis of a precise conception of this notion" (ibid., 361).
These passages can be interpreted in various ways. Tarski advocated a special
conception of science on which several old philosophical problems became scientific
 TARSKl'S THEORY OF TRUTH AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 59

when they were precisely formulated. One can argue that it was rather a naive hope.
Hence, we can say that there are many philosophical problems of truth that do not
become scientific, even after being made precise, for example by devices of formal
semantics. Independently of pessimism or optimism in this respect, one should be
very careful about deriving too much from Tarski's remarks on naive realism, etc.
He probably used adjectives 'naive' and 'critical' in a sense in which they occurred
in Polish philosophical writings of the thirties, that is, for some views concerning
perception. My guess is that Tarski wanted to say: whatever view you have about
perception, naive realism, critical realism or idealism you can accept the semantic
conception of truth. The same may be said about the relation of the semantic
conception to the empiricist or metaphysical attitude. It is not certain what Tarski
would say on contemporary debates between realism and antirealism. Perhaps he
would say that his truth theory was also independent of these issues. Perhaps not.
Anyway, I would bet on the second for a connection of his truth defmition with
bivalence. It is not quite sure which elements of the semantic conception of truth
were regarded as philosophically important by Tarski himself. His own explications
pointed out the T-scheme and the convention (T) above all. Sometimes he seemed to
regard the definition itself as a formal trick. However, sometimes he answered his
critics that they neglected the defmition and focused only on the T-scheme. In my
view, all points collected in (A) - (K) are of philosophical significance. Even if this
does not fit Tarski's original intentions, I do not feel obliged to be bound by his
outlook.
There are several objections to Tarski's semantic defmition of truth as a
philosophical contribution. I will touch only two points (see Niniiluoto, 1994, for a
more extensive treatment). The first concerns the relativization of truth to languages
and models. It is often said (see Black, 1948, as a locus classicus) that this
relativization goes against ordinary intuitions, because the concept of truth in natural
language is language-independent. Thus, the semantic conception of truth does not
capture the ordinary concept of truth, contrary to Tarski's own opinion (sometimes
called the Tarski Claim). In order to defend the semantic conception on this point,
assume that the theory of relativity is criticized, because it goes against ordinary
feelings that some events are absolutely simultaneous, and introduces a relativisation
to a frame of reference. Of course, this way of criticizing the theory of relativity
would be rather strange. Tarski's relativization to a language has two aspects. First, it
indicates that something is dependent on meanings of expressions, which can vary
from one language to another. Secondly, relativization is made to a language of a
particular order (object language, metalanguage, etc.) in order to eliminate semantic
paradoxes; similarly the relativization to frames of reference solves quite definite
troubles of physics. Metaphorically speaking, if semantic concepts travel across
languages of different order, sometimes they exceed the admissible 'semantic
velocity'. If some situations are excluded, for example if we do not pretend to define
truth for L in L itself or we do not use the Liar sentences, we can operate the
predicate 'true' without relativization. However, the situation changes when we pass
to general theory. Thus, I do not see very much wisdom in arguments of this sort.
60 JAN WOLEN-SKI

Perhaps this comparison with physics is too pretentious, but it does give us some
insights.
The relativization to languages and models leads to the plurality of truth-
predicates. It is argued in (Kripke, 1975) that this situation is counterintuitive.
Apparently, if we have a hierarchy Lo, Lh L 2, ••• such that for every k = 1,2, ... , Lk is
a metalanguage for L k-h we obtain a sequence To, Th T 2, ••• of truth-predicates,
where Tk (k = 0, 1,2, ... ) is the truth-predicate for Lk which is defmed in the proper
metalanguage, that is L k+1. Clearly, particular predicates are different because they
denote different sets of truths. However, this plurality is not as large as it seems at
the first sight. Due to the constraints on metalanguages, any metalanguage has
resourses for translating all sentences of the object language into it. L t is the first
language in which we define a truth-predicate (for Lo). Then, we have Lz and a truth-
predicate for L, but we can translate all sentences containing instances of To into L 2:
if we have L k, all applications of lower truth predicates can be translated into this
language and thereby put into a uniform framework. In fact, we always have only
two truth-predicates, one which captures all those that have been previously
introduced and one which is defmed at the moment. This move can be iterated
without limitations, other than those stated in Tarski's conditions. Another related
remark is this: even if'true-in-Lk' and 'true-in-Lk+t ' are different, the meaning of
'true' in both contexts can be regarded as the same or at least almost the same. Ifwe
defme 'true-in-Lk', the phrase 'true' is in fact a syncategorematic word. Its meaning
is derived from the method of defining of 'true-in-Lk'. Because the method is
repeated at any stage, it produces an almost identical effect, perhaps derived from the
ordinary meaning of 'true', similarly as 'simultaneity-in-a-frame-of-reference' is
certainly related to the ordinary meaning of simultaneity. One more question requires
an explanation. The construction forbids a defmition of all truth-predicates. It means
that we have no language in which we can express the defmition of the set of all
truth-predicates. But it seems that we do not follow this prescription, because we
speak about this set. This is not so, because we do not define the set of all truth
predicates. The prescription does not prohibit us to say some things about the set of
all truth-predicates, for example that it is infinite. The prescription prohibits us from
doing something that we know is leading to a contradiction. We do not know
whether our talk is consistent, but as long as inconsistency is not proved, we can
believe that our almost universal language is coherent.
So much for relativization to a language. But we also have a relativization to a
model. I will not enter into a quite complicated story about why this relativization
was not noted by Tarski in his early works on truth. Probably because he operated
with a fixed language and could assume that its domain was automatically given.
Now we know that not every intepreted language uniquely forces its interpretation,
due to the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem. Thus, 'true-in-L' is not sufficient and must
be extended to 'true-in-L-and-M'.
John Etchemendy (1988) offered a simple argument that the semantic conception
of truth violates ordinary intuitions (see also Gjelsvik, 1995). Assume that we have a
 TARSKI'S THEORY OF TRUTH AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 61

language L which consists only of two sentences: 'snow is white' (S) and 'grass is
green' (R). Now we have two obvious truth conditions:

(13) '8' is true in L iff snow is white;

(14) 'R' is true in L iff grass is green.

We give the following definition of truth for L:

(15) x is true in L iff x = 'S' and snow is white or x = 'R' and grass is green.

This defmition satisfies the convention (T), because it entails (13) and (14). (15) also
leads to the following two statements:

(16) 'S' = 'S' and snow is white or'S' = 'R' and grass is green iff snow is white.
(17) 'R' = 'S' and snow is white or 'R' = 'R' and grass is green iff grass is green.

According to Etchemendy, (16) and (17) seem to have nothing to do with relevant
semantic information and truth-conditions for 8 and R. However, it is not clear why
(16) and (17) must be considered as violating our intuitions. Take the left side of
(16). It is the disjunction: 'S' = 'S' and snow is white or'S' = 'R' and grass is green.
Its second disjunct is false, because'S' = 'oR'. Thus, we can stay with the first
disjunct, namely: '8' = 'S' and snow is white. Since its first member is logically true,
the whole is equivalent to the sentence 'snow is white'. As the result we obtain:

(18) snow is white iff snow is white,

which is rather difficult to contest. A similar argument shows that (17) is an

expanded version of

(19) grass is green iff grass is green.

Let me return now to more philosophical issues. The semantic conception of truth
is also a theory of falsity. It also selects a kind of truth-bearers, that is, objects on
which truth-values are predicated. Not univocally, because it can operate with all
items to which semantic properties can be attributed. I am using 'sentences', but one
can also deal with propositions, judgments, statements, thoughts, etc. The semantic
conception does not decide itself whether norms or evaluations are true or false. It
depends on several other views in axiology. This is an important observation,
because some authors claim that norms are neither true nor false in virtue of pure
semantics alone. Since the semantic conception of truth relates truth to models, it
sees truth as relative to something else which is not a truth-bearer. Thus the semantic
conception fulfils all Russell's demands. However, it does not mean that the
semantic conception is the strong correspondence theory of truth. In order to see that
the semantic conception is not the strong correspondence theory, the best way is to
62 JAN WOLEN-SKI

look at the nature of sequences of objects. There is a temptation to regard them as

something like facts. This is, I believe, a completely wrong interpretation. Sequences
are not facts. If A is a sentence, no sequence is distinguished from its point of view.
We achieve nothing if we say that A corresponds with all sequences. There is no
relation of correspondence between sentences and portions of reality. In a sense,
sentences 'snow is white' and 'grass is green' correspond to the reality in the same
sense and to the same extent. Yet the semantic conception is not undermined by the
slingshot argument, because it does not need the concept of fact. Of course, if one
wants to say that the intension of 'snow is white' expresses a fact and this fact is
different from the fact expressed by the sentence 'grass is green', one can do this.
One can even say that satisfaction of a sentence A by all sequences means that this
sentence expresses a fact, let us say F(A), which just corresponds withA. However, it
is a completely redundant talk which adds nothing to the basic defmition: truth
consists in satisfaction of a sentence by all sequences. In fact, in order to use this
style of talking, one points out only that sentences have a completely saturated
intension when they are true or false; a false sentence also has a completely saturated
intension, because it does not express any fact. No negative facts are needed here.
Thus, the semantic conception of truth assumes a weak concept of correspondence:
the concept of correspondence in this scheme can be called 'semantic
correspondence' (Wolenski, 1993). Some important conclusions follow
automatically. There is no problem for negative sentences, existential or not. The
sentence 'Pegasus does not exist' is true, because no sequence of objects satisfies the
sentence 'Pegasus exists', and similarly for the sentence 'London is not the capital of
France' (it is satisfied by all sequences). Also we have no trouble with truths of logic
and mathematics. Logical truths are satisfied by all sequences in all models. A
solution of the problem for mathematical truths depends on the view on mathematics
and I will skip this question here. I do not want to say that the semantic conception
has no relation to specific objects, but it is the case of satisfaction, not of truth. This
is a good occasion to touch the problem of truth-criteria. Assume that we should
check whether London is the capital of England. Transform the sentence 'London is
the capital of England' into an open formula 'x is the capital of England' and ask
whether London satisfies this formula. Ways of checking this question are
truth-criteria. We do not need to compare 'London' with London or 'London is the
capital of England' with the fact that London is the capital of England. We need only
to think whether London satisfies the formula 'x is the capital of England'. It is not
the task of logic or semantics to give advice about how to conduct investigations
leading to an answer about whether given objects satisty given conditions. The
semantic conception also says another important thing about the relation of truth and
its criteria. It follows from limitative results. We know that the set of truths in rich
formal systems is not defmable by the concept of provability. Now, truth as a
semantic concept is not definable by provability as a syntactic concept. More:
provability is an effective concept, truth is not. Hence, truth is not effectively
defmed. This is the situation in the domain of mathematical truths. Perhaps we can
generalize it in this way. Think about effective truth criteria; not any truth criteria,
 TARSKI'S THEORY OF TRUTH AS A PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY 63

but just effective ones. Using an analogy with mathematics, we can say: truth is not
definable by its criteria, if they are to be effective. This conclusion fits the
philosophical tradition, because the criteria of truth were always conceived as
effective procedures, that is, performable in a finite number of steps. Thus, it is quite
easy to incorporate a reasonable account of truth-criteria into the semantic
conception of truth. It was not by accident that clever advocates of the
correspondence theory of truth maintained that truth was not defmable in terms of
criteria. The semantic conception explains why this is the case. It also explains that
truth could be defined by non-effective criteria, but it has been accessible only to the
infmite mind. We can go further into the problem of truth-criteria in the framework
of the semantic conception. I guess that the following insights are correct: (a) truth
and truth-criteria have different logics; (b) the logic of truth is classical, the logic of
its criteria is constructive; (c) the concept of fact is relevant for the logic of truth-
criteria, but not for the concept of truth. I must leave a more extensive treatment of
these claims to another occasion (see Wolenski, in prep.).
The semantic conception regards truth as an epistemological concept. But it also
has far-reaching consequences for ontology. Traditionally, being was a counterpart
of truth. If the set of truths is not definable, neither is the set of beings, contrary to
perennial efforts of philosophers. The set of all beings is not defmable, because it
requires the definition of the set of all models, which is prevented by the
undefinability theorem. This recalls very deep intuitions of the Great Schoolmen that
being is a peculiar concept and it is not subjected to typical logical operations. The
semantic conception explains this situation, which is really dramatic for more
traditionally thinking ontologists: it is possible to define a region of being, but not
the entire being, assuming, of course, that ontology is governed by set theory.
The semantic conception of truth implies bivalence and thereby regards the
division of truth-bearers into true and false as exhaustive and disjoint. But this
division is also stable, which means that the semantic concept of truth is not
relativistic, but absolute. This is an interesting point which deserves special attention
(see Wolenski 1994b). In particular, we can prove (Lesniewski, 1913/1992) that the
etemality and sempitemality of truth are equivalent modulo the semantic conception.
Etemality (if something is true, it remains true for ever) never (or almost never)
troubled philosophers, but sempitemality (if something is true, it always was true)
very often did. As by-product, we have that if one claims that many-valued logic is
needed to save the situtaion, one should modify the semantic conception. This
remark is dedicated to the advocates of the position that the classical logic can be
abandoned, but Tarski's truth definition retained. This is also important for the
realism/anti-realism issue. Since realism is often defmed by bivalence, rejecting
bivalence is characteristic of anti-realism; bivalence is a consequence of the semantic
definition of truth, so the semantic conception is obviously realistic. What about a
realistic claim that the reality transcends cognition? There is a formal argument.
Regard the reality as a counterpart of the set of all truths. This monster is not
definable. In fact, the set of all models of any first-order theory is not defmable in
this theory. Consider the acquired knowledge as any finite subset of the set of all
64 JAN waLEN-sKI

truths. Clearly, the reality is not definable by this set. This means that the reality
transcends any portion of human knowledge. The situation changes when we
consider the infinite subject of knowledge, but it is not strange.
There still remains the problem of the third observer. Let me state this in a
modern way, following Putnam (1975). He made the following objection to the
semantic conception. In order to execute the convention (T) (all instances of the T-
scheme are provable from the truth-definition), we must assume in advance that our
logic of metalanguage (or even of all metalanguages) is sound, that is, it does not
lead to false instances of the T-scheme. However, soundness involves the concept of
truth: all provable sentences are true. Thus, the semantic conception is circular: it
requires the defmed concept in advance. However, this argument is not correct. In
order to avoid circularity we must replace soundness, certainly a semantic category,
by something syntactic. This is possible by assuming that our metatheory of truth is
ffi-consistent. Although the requirement of ffi-consistency is strong, it is still
syntactic. Once again I give a pretentious comparison with physics. One can argue
that quantum mechanics is circular. It explains some phenomena but uses instruments
which are subject to quantum effects. The solution is that they are objects of the
macroworld for which quantum effects can be neglected. Something very similar
takes place in our case. In some situations, we can neglect semantic effects by using
syntactic devices. This is a sort of miracle which allows us to do semantics in a
theoretically correct way. The syntactic aspect of the semantic conception of truth is
also clear in the following formulation: for any sentence 'A is true', there is a system
of set theory in which A is a theorem. Thus, A is true if and only if it is a theorem of
some system of set theory. It is important to note that we say: theorem of set theory,
not a truth of set theory. Of course, because of the incompleteness phenomena there
is no system of set theory which could comprise all truths.
I hope that I have shown that the semantic conception touches all the
philosophical problems of truth indicated above. It clarifies some of them, solves
others, incorporates still others. It also demonstrates that in order to do philosophy of
truth in a way which respects the long tradition, we need a quite comprehensive
theory of truth, related to a variety of mutually interdependent issues. Certainly, not
only the semantic conception is able to perform this job, but a comparison of various
rivals cannot be restricted to single selected points. And one condition is fairly
indispensable: any philosophical theory of truth cannot say too little. Let me add that
most of the questions and proposals considered in the present paper will be more
fully developed in my forthcoming monograph (Wolenski, in prep.).

Jagiel/onian University at Krakow

REFERENCES
Baldwin, James M. (ed.): 1901-1905, The Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, New York,
MacmilIan.
Black, Max: 1948, 'The Semantic Conception of Truth', Analysis 8, 49-63.
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Etchemendy, John: 1988, 'Tarski on Truth and Logical Consequence', Journal of Symbolic Logic 53,51-
79.
Gjelsvik, Olaf: 1995, 'On Convention T, and whether a Tarskian Truth-Definition Catches Hold of the
Classical Conception of Truth', in J. Hill and P. Kot'atko (eds.): Karlovy Vary Study in Reference
and Meaning, Filosofia, Prague, pp. 343-364.
Joachim, Harold: 1906, The Nature of Truth, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Kripke, Saul: 1975, 'Outline ofa Theory of Truth', Journal of Philosophy 72, 690-716.
Lesniewski, Stanislaw: 191311992, 'Is All Truth Only True Eternally or It Is Also True without a
Beginning', in St. Lesniewski: Collected Works (ed. by S. 1. Surma, 1. T. Srzednicki, D. I. Barnett
and V. F. Rickey), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, pp. 86-114 (Polish original appeared in
1913).
Niiniluoto,I1kka: 1994, 'Defending Tarski against His Critics', in B. Twardowski and 1. Wolenski (eds.):
Sixty Years of Tarski 's Definition of Truth, Philed, Krakow, pp. 48-68.
Pitcher, George: 1964, 'Introduction', in G. Pitcher (ed.): Truth, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, pp. 1-
15.
Pogorzelski, Witold: 1994, Notions and Theorems of Elementary Formal LogiC, Warsaw University -
Bialystok Branch, Bialystok.
Putnam, Hilary: 1975, 'Do True Assertions Correspond to Reality?', in H. Putnam: Mind, Language and
Reality Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 70-84.
Russell, Bertrand A: 1912, The Problems of Philosophy, London, Wiliams and Norgate.
Schlick, Moritz: 1974, General Theory of Knowledge, Wi en, Springer (German original, 2nd ed.,
appeared in 1925).
Tarski, Alfred: 1944, 'The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics', Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 4, 241-275.
Woleilski, Jan: 1993, 'Two Concepts of Correspondence', From the Logical Point of View II, No.3, 42-
55.
Wolenski, Jan: 1994, 'Contributions to the History of the Classical Truth-Definition', in D. Prawitz, B.
Skyrms and D. Westerstahl (eds.): Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science IX, Amsterdam,
North-Holland, pp. 481-495.
Woleilski, Jan: 1994b, 'A Controversy over the Concept of Correspondence', in J. Hintikka and K. Puhl
(eds.): The British Tradition in 20th Century Philosophy, Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austrian
Wittgenstein Society, pp. 537-542.
Woleilski, Jan: I 994c, 'Is Tarski Theory of Truth Relativistic?', in B. Twardowski and J. Woleilski
(eds.): Sixty Years of Tarski 's Definition of Truth, Philed, Krakow, pp. 96-110.
Woleilski, Jan: 1998, 'Truth and Bivalence', in T.Childers (ed.): The Logica Yearbook 1997, Filosofia,
Prague, pp. 36-43.
Woleilski, Jan: in prep., Semantics and Truth (in preparation).
 PETRKOLAll

TRUTH, CORRESPONDENCE, SATISFACTION*

INTRODUCTION
According to the correspondence intuition, that which is true (a sentence, a thought, a
proposition, a belief, and the like) is made so by there being something in the world (a
fact, a state of the world, an arrangement of things in the world, and the like), the link
between the two being explicated in terms of a relation which is to comply with some
constraints. A common way of expressing the intuition in the philosophical jargon is
this: A truth-bearer is true if and only if it is made true by (corresponds to) a truth-
maker.
Attempts to construct the correspondence theory of truth or the 'fact-based' variants
thereof aim at turning the above slogan into an explicit theory or definition of truth. The
hope is that a theoretically interesting and adequate account of truth can be given in
terms of the concepts of a truth-bearer, truth-maker, and a correspondence or making-
true relation. Such an entetprise clearly presupposes that a theory of truth-bearers, a
theory of truth-makers, and a theory of the making-true relation have been framed.
Thus one can see that two main tenets lie at the bottom of the correspondence theory of
truth: first, that the vague correspondence intuition is worth making accurate; and,
secondly, that an explicit definition of truth can result from such a specification.
I subscribe to the former tenet. In Section I of the present paper I give an outline of
a way of making the correspondence intuition more precise and giving it a formal
framework. Here it is mostly the formal properties of the alleged making-true relation
that are examined. As to the latter tenet I shall not have much to say. It will become
clear that the proposed analysis of the making-true relation does not result in a
defmition of truth.
Philosophers and logicians have attempted to turn the correspondence intuition into
something more like a theory in a number of ways. Two kinds of approaches are
relevant to the present entetprise. On the one hand, there are the contemporary fact-
based variants of the correspondence theory. Such theories entertain facts ('complexes'
explicated in various ways) as truth-makers and conceive of the correspondence
relation as based - at least to a certain extent - upon a structural similarity between the
truth-bearers and the truth-makers'. On the other hand, there is Tarski's semantic
conception of truth along with Tarski's model-theoretic notion of truth2. Tarskian
satisfaction is not based upon a structural similarity between its terms, i.e. sentences of
a language and (infinite) sequences of objects. Yet it may be tempting to conceive of

67
J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), 67-79.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
68 PETRKOLAR

Tarskian sequences as of the truth-makers, and of the satisfaction relation as of a

making-true relation3 • Also the model-theoretic notion of truth has encouraged
interpretations along the correspondence theory lines4 •
In Section 2 of the paper I contrast a fact-based approach to making the
correspondence intuition precise (namely the 'indirect correspondence' one) with
Tarski's conceptions of truth. The comparison turns to the question whether the
envisaged making-true relation and Tarski's satisfaction share any interesting formal
properties. My primary intention here is not to contribute to the debate on whether or
not Tarski was a correspondence theorist. Rather, the question is in what respects, if
any, are Tarski's conceptions of truth compatible with what I consider to be at least a
feasible way of turning the vague correspondence intuition into a theory - a theory of
the 'correspondence' relation rather than a theory of truth. We shall see that some of the
main distinctions and also similarities between Tarski's conceptions and the fact-based
explication of the correspondence intuition can be put in terms of a single property
applicable to the satisfaction and the making-true relations.

The main challenge to a theory which is to explicate the correspondence intuition is as

follows: If the making-true relation is identified with the relation of structural
isomorphism between truth-bearers and truth-makers then one gets the 'thoroughgoing
isomorphism' case which is widely considered untenable, mainly on ontological
grounds. To wit, there is no reason for the truth-makers, if any, to mirror exactly the
structure of the truth-bearers. But if the making-true relation is not identified with the
relation of structural isomorphism between truth-bearers and truth-makers then there
seems nothing left to explain the link between them.
I shall adopt the following strategy to get hold of the concept of making-true. Let us
put certainformal constraints on it first, and then try to render an interpretation of the
formal structure. Here are the constraints that one may put on the 'making-true'
relation. s

I. A conjunction is made true jOintly by (or by joint of) the truth-makers of the
conjuncts.
II. Whatever is logically entailed by a truth-bearer is made true by the truth-bearer's
truth-maker(s).
m.a A negated truth-bearer of the form -F(a}, ... ,an) is not made true if the truth-bearer
of the form F(a}, ... ,an) is.
Otherwise, the negated truth-bearer of the basic form -F(a}, ... ,an) is made true
jointly by all truth-makers that are made up using any of the individuals a}, ... ,an•
m.b A negated truth-bearer of the form -3x~(x) is made true jointly by the truth-makers
of all its instances. ('~(x)' indicates that x is free in ~.)

A few remarks on the above principles of making true are in order here. The list
embodies to a large extent the requirement of ontological parsimony as regards truth-
 TRUTH, CORRESPONDENCE, SATISFACTION 69

makers. In particular, according to principle I, one can conceive of making true a

conjunction without necessarily invoking conjunctive facts. Principle II encapsulates
the idea that necessarily equivalent truth-bearers, if true, have all truth-makers in
common. Thus, in particular, the principle entails that, e.g. the truth-bearers 'London is
west of Prague' and 'Prague is east of London' are made true by the same thing. From
II, it can be inferred by standard logic that the disjunction of truth-bearers is made true
by whatever makes either of its disjuncts true. Therefore there is no need to introduce
disjunctive facts. And finally, principle III makes room for the explication of making
true a negative truth-bearer without having to employ negative facts.
In I-III, nothing specific is presupposed about thejointly operation. Yet, it is fairly
reasonable to require that it have at least the following formal properties: A*A=A, i.e.
idempotence, A*B=B*A, i.e. commutativity, and (A*B)*C=A*(B*C), i.e. associativity.
(A,B, and C are arbitrary truth-makers, and ,*, stands forjoint.)
A worry might arise if one wished to conceive of principles I-III as of implicitly
defining a making-true relation. There is an obvious reason to repudiate the impression
that the principles in question may do such a job. Principle II invokes the concept of the
logical entailment which is truth-theoretical. On pain of circularity, such a concept must
not be used in a defmition of a truth-making relation which, in turn, is to be used in a
definition of truth. On such grounds one should not conceive of principles I-III as being
strictly definitional. Instead, the principles are to be taken at face value, i.e. as
expressing some basic formal constraints that we expect a making-true relation to
satisfy.
As to truth-bearers, I take them to be structured entities. As such, they can be either
(complete declarative) sentences of a language or the structured meanings of such
sentences. The structured meanings can be fOl1l1ally modelled by means of, e.g.
Bealer's thoughts, TichY's propositional constructions, or Cresswell's structured
meanings6 •
As to truth-makers or facts, I take them to be as fine-grained as necessary
equivalents7• Call such a constraint the minimal fact diversity constraint. It accords
with the common intuition to the effect that, for instance, 'London is west of Prague'
and 'Prague is east of London' are made true by the same thing. For here we have two
different yet necessarily equivalent truth-bearers and it seems reasonable to require that
if true they be made true by the same truth-maker(s). For the present purpose, I need
not develop a fact theory in full detail, and hence can confine myself to accepting the
above constraint on the nature of facts.
Doubts may immediately arise as to the tenability of constraint. It requires that facts
be less fine-grained than sentences but that there be more that one Davidsonian 'Great'
facts. Various slingshot arguments have been designed to establish that a coherent
alliance of the minimal fact diversity constraint and principle II above is impossible.
For instance, Davidson's well-known 'Great Fact' argument is meant to establish that if
the correspondence relation is governed by certain logical principles which Davidson
advances and which seem to validate principle II then the minimal diversity
requirement cannot be met as an ontological collapse of facts into a single entity results.
To the same effect other versions of the slingshot argument may be - and have been-
70 PETRKOLAR

applied, the most serious and important among them probably being GOdel's slingshot
which was recently re-interpreted and discussed at length by Stephen Neale 9 • Without
going into detail in the present paper I would like to remark that elsewhere I have
suggested a way of reconciling the above two requirements while discharging GOdel's
slingshot on the basis of a theory of defmite descriptions which treats the descriptions
as terms standing for partial functions that map possible worlds onto logical
individuals 10.
At this point, the 'indirect correspondence' story comes in. As the truth-bearers are
fme-grained while the truth-makers are coarse-grained, the explication of making-true
in terms of a direct structural isomorphism between them is doomed to failure. Yet the
correspondence intuition has it that in the fact which makes 'London is west of Prague'
true, London, Prague, and the west-ofrelation are somehow involved.
The idea is to make use of the isomorphism relation (at least at the level of atomic
truth-bearers) by letting it link the structured truth-bearer with something other than the
unstructured truth-maker; this other thing being such that it uniquely determines the
truth-maker. Let us say that the truth-bearer directly corresponds to a w~ a truth-maker
can be constructed or to a construction of a truth-maker. The construction of a fact
becomes a mediator between the truth-bearer and its truth-maker. To put it another way,
an atomic truth-bearer, if true, is structurally isomorphic with a structured construction
of an existent truth-maker which is itself coarse-grained.
Let me explain. It is the case that London is west of Prague. Here, we have
described a possible way of arranging things in the world, namely by picking London,
picking Prague, and placing the former west of the latter. At the level of a formal
treatment we speak of the procedure of applying the relation west-of to the ordered
couple of objects, London and Prague. Let us depict the arrangement as
<west-of,London,Prague>.
Yet, as we know, there is another way of arriving at the same fact, namely via the
procedure of applying the relation east-of to the ordered couple of objects, Prague and
London. Accordingly, the fact in question can also be depicted as
<east-of,Prague,London>.
There are two points to stress. First, the procedures mentioned are distinct and yet
'necessarily equivalent' in that they both always determine or result in the same fact.
And secondly, one of the two mutually equivalent procedures directly corresponds to
the truth-bearer in question.
Each of the procedures directly corresponds to one of the truth-bearers, 'London is
west of Prague' and 'Prague is east of London', respectively. But both of the
procedures determine the same truth-maker, for we assumed that the truth-makers are
as fme-grained as necessary equivalents, which makes <west-of, London, Prague> and
<east-of,Prague,London> the same truth-maker. We say that the truth-bearers in
question indirectly correspond to the truth-maker via the respective procedures. Details
of a development of the idea of indirect correspondence between truth-bearers and
truth-makers can be found elsewhere ' !'
You may wonder whether the concept of 'construction' can be made any clearer.
Entities of such a kind have been formally introduced, for instance, by George Bealer
 TRUTH, CORRESPONDENCE, SATISFACTION 71

or Pavel Tichy12. In the idea of indirect correspondence, the above picture of the link
between a truth-bearer and a truth-maker via a construction of the truth-maker at the
atomic level is generalized and merged with the principles I-III. Thus the 'indirect
correspondence' view of truth-making can be given the following compact formulation:

CORR
A truth-bearer <l> is made true by (indirectly corresponds to) the truth-maker C if and
only if
(a) <l> is atomic
and <l> directly corresponds to (is structurally isomorphic with) a construction of C,
or
(b) <l>=e&1;
and there are truth-makers A and B such that e is made true by A and I; is made true
by B, and C is the joint of A and B, or
e
(c) f=<I>
e
and is made true by C, or
(d) <l>=~F(aj, ... ,an)
and F(a], ... ,an) is not made true by any truth-maker, and C is the joint of all truth-
makers that are made up using any of the individuals aj, ... ,am or
(e) <l>=-3xl;(x)
and there are truth-makers A], ... ,An such that AJ makes true ~I;[a/x] for all
individuals 0, and C is the joint of Aj, ... ,An.

A simple example might illustrate the meaning of clauses (d) and (e). Let a universe
consist of three individuals, a,b, and c. Let a world W consist of five truth-makers:
<A,a>, <B,a,b>, <C,c>, <A,c>, and <D,c,b>. In such a scenario, the following holds
according to (d):

'~Ca' is made true by <A,a>*<B,a,b> ,

'~Fa' is made true by <A,a>*<B,a,b>,
'~Fb' is made true by <B,a,b>*<D,c,b>, and
'~Fc' is made true by <C,c>*<A,c>*<D,c,b>.

Therefore it holds according to (e) that

'~3xFx' is made true by <A,a>*<B,a,b>*<C,c>*<A,c>*<D,c,b>

which is all the truth-makers that make up the world W.

I have argued elsewhere that the joint operation can be intepreted in terms of the
mereological sum of truth-makers 13. In what follows, I stick to this particular
interpretation.
72 PETRKOLAJl

In CORR, a few basic conditions are stated which a relation between what is true and
what makes it true is to meet. In what follows, I take CORR to be a useful specification
of the characteristics of the making-true relation. Needless to say that it need not be the
only or the best possible way of framing the correspondence ituition.
Tarski's semantic conception of truth offers another account of a relation between
what is true and what makes it true. Tarskian truth-bearers are (closed) sentences of a
language, L. The truthfulness in L of a sentence of L is defined in tenns of satisfaction.
The tenns of the satisfaction relation are open sentences (sentential functions) or closed
sentences of L and infmite sequences of objects. The ultimate goal of the
correspondence theories is defming 'true' in tenns of a correspondence to a truth-
maker. For the reasons outlined above I give up such an enterprise. In Tarski's semantic
conception, 'true[-in-L]' is defined in tenns of satisfaction by all sequences which in
turn is shown to be equivalent to satisfaction by a sequence l4 • That is the fundamental
concept of Tarski's semantic conception. Let me put the conception (for a fixed
language, L) in the following fonn l5 •

TSC
Satisfaction
The sentence q, is satisfied by the sequence/if and only if
a) q, = 'P(y], ... J'k)' and the 1st element of/thru the k-th element of/stand in the
relation P, or
b) ct>=-F and / does not satisfy F, or
c) q,= 'FI v F2' and/satisfies FI or/satisfies F2, or
d) q,=''l:/y,f'' and every sequence q which differs from / in at most the n-th place
satisfies F.
Truth
q, is a true sentence if and only if q, is a meaningful sentence and every infinite
sequence of objects satisfies q,.

Two remarks seem to be appropriate here. First, the problem of defining truth-in-L
for closed atomic sentences containing individual constants arises for TSC. In Tarski's
original fonnulation, there is no direct way of defining the truth-in-L for sentences like
'Pa'. There are several ways TSC can be adjusted to cope with such cases. One way is
to add a separate clause for each individual constant and each predicate in L to the
clauses that characterize the satisfaction relation. Thus one gets additional clauses like
the following ones.

'Pa' is satisfied by/if and only if a is P, 'Qa' is satisfied by/if and only if a is Q,
etc l6 •

Another way is to derive the relevant clauses from TSC and Tarski's own remark on
denotation 17 • Finally, one may adopt Hartry Field's interpretation of Tarski, according
to which satisfaction for closed atomic sentences is defined in tenns of the application
 TRUTH, CORRESPONDENCE, SATISFACTION 73

of a predicate to its argumene s. The second remark is to the effect that the following
principles are derivable from TSC:

The sentence <D is satisfied by the sequence fif and only if

e) <D= 'Fl & F2' andfsatisfies Fl andfsatisfies F2, or
t) <D='3y",F' and there is a sequence, q, which differs fromfin at most the m-th
place and q satisfies F.

Donald Davidson wrote:

Truth, as Tarski showed, is easily defmed on the basis of satisfaction; but,

alternatively, satisfaction can be taken to be whatever relation yields a correct
account oftruth (my emphasis)19.

In the light of the above quotation, it is easier to understand the attempts to construe
TSC and the correspondence theory as variants of each other. My goal is, however,
slightly different and more modest: namely to address the following questions. What
are the (logical) relationships between the relation characterized by clauses I-III and
Tarski's satisfaction? In particular, do the clauses which characterize the relation of
indirect correspondence meet the conditions which characterize Tarskian satisfaction
and/or vice versa?
In one respect, asking the above questions seems futile. Consider, for instance, the
attempt to interpret Tarski's semantic conception as a variant of the correspondence
theory by taking the sentences of L as the truth-bearers, the infmite sequences of objects
as the truth-makers, and the satisfaction relation as the making-true relation. Such an
interpretation does not illuminate Tarski's conception any further and even clashes with
the basic idea that underlies the correspondence intuition, namely the idea that not all
different truth-bearers are made true by the same truth-maker. (Recall that in Tarski's
semantic conception, any true sentence is satisfied by all sequences.) Despite the prima
facie futility of interpreting Tarski's satisfaction as the truth-making relation in the
above manner, the following question is, I believe, still worth asking. If both
satisfaction and (various kinds ot) the truth-making relation are to explicate the link
between what is true and what makes it true and if they both are to ground a correct
account of truth, then what basic formal properties do they share and what formal
properties do they differ in?
Here is a way to show that in terms of contrasting TSC to CORR a neat formulation
can be given to the idea that TSC cannot be interpreted as a correspondence theory of
truth. Technically speaking, we are asking whether the principles I-III are validated if a
suitable interpretation of the jointly operator is furnished and the following holds:

(R) Truth-bearers are sentences of L, truth-makers are infmite sequences of

objects, and'makes true' is interpreted as 'satisfies'.
74 PETRKOLAR

Indeed, specifYing what could play the role of the jointly operator in the TSC
framework seems to be the main trouble. In CORR,joint is to be an operation on truth-
makers. Such an operation has no counterpart within TSC. With regard to the required
properties of '*', it holds that if there is such a joint-like operation on Tarski's
sequences then it must meet all of the following conditions (j,g, and h are arbitrary
sequences).

l.j*.f=/
2.j*g=g*/
3.j*(g*h)=(j*g)*h
4. If ~ is made true by/and <I> is made true by g then ~&<I> is made true by j*g
(see CORR(b».
5. Conditions CORR(d)-(e).

Now, in order that condition 4 above be met, the *-operator must be a meet-like
operator (n) on sequences, i.e. the resulting sequence j*g must contain the respective
members of/in the respective places and the respective members of g in the (other)
respective places. Then I don't see any way of defming the *-operator so that condition
2 (and, perhaps, also 3) be met at the same time. Moreover, condition 5 requires that
the *-operator be join-like (u) in order that a true negation be made true by something.
This last requirement is incompatible with the n-like character of the operator as
required by 4. Hence I conclude that on the interpretation (R), the required jointly-
operator cannot be defmed as an operation on Tarski's sequences which precludes
interpreting TSC as a CORR-compatible theory.
The following claim shows that the considerations on the making-true of the
'negative' truth-bearers reveal an interesting difference between CORR and TSC as
regards their logical strength.

Claim!
For all sentences F, it holds in TSC that
-F is satisfied by the sequence/if and only if/does not satisfY F;
while in CORR, it only holds that
If -F is made true by the truth-maker C then F is not made true by C.

The difference between CORR and TSC is due to the fact that, according to the
correspondence intuition, different truth-bearers can have different truth-makers while
according to TSC they cannot. CORR allows for there being truth-makers that do not
make either -F or Ftrue. In the above sense, CORR is weaker than TSC.
And here is a way to show what would have to be changed to make TSC a
CORR-compatible theory: Let us define the concept of satisfaction# in the following
way. A sentence <I> is satisjied# by the set of Tarskian sequences U if and only if <I> is
satisfied by every sequence in U. Then slightly change (R) and assume that the
following holds:
 TRUTH, CORRESPONDENCE, SATISFACTION 75

(R') Truth-bearers are sentences of L, truth-makers are sets of sequences, and

'makes true' is interpreted as 'satisfies#'.

Interpretation (R') deviates only a little from what Tarski teaches us. According to
TSC, true sentences are satisfied by all sequences, i.e. by any sequence. According to
(R'), true sentences are satisfied# by the set of all sequences. Then the jointly operator
can be defmed either as the set-theoretical intersection or as the set-theoretical union of
sets of Tarskian sequences. Now, if we take closed sentences as the truth-bearers then
conditions I-III are met. For if truth-bearers are closed sentences then according to (R'),
any truth-maker is identical with the set of all sequences and the joint of truth-makers is
identical with the set of all sequences as well. Clearly, either of the set-theoretical
operations satisfies conditions 1-3 above as the intersection/union of the set of all
sequences with itself is again the set of all sequences. For the same reasons, conditions
4 and 5 are also met.
It is worth noticing that the result does not hold for open sentences. For instance, a
conjunction of open sentences is satisfied# by the intersection of the sets that satisfy#
the respective conjuncts. But the conjunction is not satisfied# by the union of the
respective sets; not every sequence which is a member the union satisfies both of the
conjuncts. Thus, in the case of open sentences, the *-operator has to be interpreted as
the set-theoretical intersection in order that CORR(b) become valid. But then, again,
the requirements 4 and 5 pull in opposite directions.
Let us use the symbol I<I> I to denote the set of sequences that satisfies# <1>. Then it
I I I I
holds that <1>&1; <;;;; <I> for all 1;. In other words, the truth-maker of a conjunction is a
subset of the truth-maker of either conjunct. It also holds that <1>&1;1=<1>, and hence it
should hold that I<1>&1; I= I<I> I in order that CORR(c) becomes valid. But in general,
the set of all sequences that satisfy <1>&1; is not the same as the set of sequences that
satisfy <1>. We shall see below how this property of satisfaction (that carries over to
satisfaction#) affects in general the relationship between the correspondence theories
and Tarski's conceptions of truth. The foregoing considerations lead to

Claim II
TSC meets the conditions I-III only if joint is interpreted either as the set-theoretical
intersection or as the set-theoretical union, 'sentence' means the same as 'closed
sentence', and (R') is the case.

In other words, under conditions stated in Claim II, TSC complies with the constraints
that we imposed on the making-true relation. Under such conditions, we may speak of
TSC as of a variant of the correspondence theory.
Let us now turn to Tarski's concept of truth in a model. Let L be a first-order
language, let aj,a2, ... be extralogical constants, and P,Q, ... be predicates. A model
structure or L-structure is an ordered couple M=<A,/> where A is the domain, and I is
the interpretation function which assigns members of A to individual constants ai,
subsets of A to I-place predicates, subsets of AxA to 2-place predicates, etc. Then
Tarski's model-theoretical conception of truth can be put as follows:
76 PETRKOLAR

TTM
Satisfaction in M =<A,I>
a) 'P(yl, .... J'n)' is satisfied by the sequence s in M if and only if <s },oo.,s,;> E l(P);
b) '- F is satisfied by the sequence s in M if and only if it is not the case that s satisfies
'F
c) 'FJ v F2' is satisfied by the sequence s in M if and only if s satisfies 'Fl' or s
satisfies 'F2';
d) 'Vx;F is satisfied by the sequence s in Mifand only if'F is satisfied by sCi/b) for all
bEA, where sCi/b) is a sequence obtained from s by replacing Si with b.
TruthinM
cI> is true in M if and only if cI> is satisfied by all sequences s from A20.

Following the strategy adopted in the foregoin~ section, let us call the set of all
sequences g such that g satisfies cI> (in symbols: IcI> IM) the truth-maker ofa sentence t/J
(in structure M)21. We shall say that a sentence cI> is satisfied# in M by the set of
Tarskian sequences U if and only if ct> is satisfied in M by every sequence in U. Then
the following holds true:
IcI>&~ Iu= IcI> 1M'll ~ 1M
where 'n' stands for the set-theoretical intersection, and
IcI>&~ LI4!; IcI> IM
where '!;' stands for the set-theoretical inclusion.

If we apply a notation analogical to CORR to symbolize the truth-maker of cI> as [cI>]

then the following holds true:
[cI>&~]=[cI>]*[~]
where ,*, stands for the mereological sum of truth-makers, and
[cI>]<[cI>&I;]
where '<' stands for the mereological part.

Call the truth-making relation persistent if and only if for all truth-bearers cI>,~ and
all truth-makers B, it holds that if B makes ct> true and cI>1=~ then B also makes ~ true.
Now, the indirect correspondence relation is persistent, for the persistence condition is
explicitly stated in CORR(c). Is the Tarski-style truth-making relation also persistent?
In the TSC or TTM framework, we called the truth-maker of ct> (in M) the set of all
sequences that satisfy ct> (in M). If a Tarski-style making-true relation, i.e. satisfaction#,
were persistent it would hold, in particular, that

If Ict>&~ I makes the sentence cI>&~ true then IcI>&~ I also makes the sentence cI>
true (as cI>&~I=cI».

But IcI>&~ I is not the set of all sequences that satisfy ct>. As we have seen, in general it
only holds that IcI>&~ I!; IcI> I.
 TRUTH, CORRESPONDENCE, SATISF ACTION 77

Claim III
The (indirect) correspondence relation is persistent while satisfaction# in general is not.

Now, if <I> and ~ are closed sentences then it holds that if I<I>&~ I makes the sentence
I I
<I>&~ true then <I>&~ also makes the sentence <I> true22 •

Claim IV
In the special case of satisfaction# of closed sentences, persistence of satisfaction# is
established.

The upshot of the foregoing considerations is this. If a Tarski-style conception of

truth which is based on the concept of satisfaction of a sentence by a sequence of
objects is to comply with the constraints on the making-true relation as stated in I-III,
then it has to treat all true sentences as being made true by the same thing, namely by
all sequences or the set of all sequences. Such a move is, nevertheless, fatal for the
'strong' correspondence theory of truth as it clashes with another correspondence idea,
namely that different truth-bearers are not always made true by the same truth-makers.
With regard to the result, Tarski gives a precise and logically strong account of the
'making-true' relation at the cost of jettisoning the correspondence theorists' principal
constraints on the nature of truth-makers (see Claim II). The 'strong' correspondence
theories of truth, on the other hand, strive to stick to the latter at the cost of losing,
among other things, the logical strength (see Claim I) or the precision of the account of
the making-true relation23 •

Academy a/Sciences a/the Czech Republic and Charles University, Prague

NOTES
• Research for this paper was supported by the research grant No. A0009704 of the Grant Agency of the
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
I See, e.g. van Fraassen (1975), Bealer (1982), or Pendlebury (1986).
2 See Tarski (1931,1944,1954).
3 Cf., for instance, Davidson (1990) where such an intepretation is envisaged and rejected. Woleriski and
Simons (1989) treat Tarski's semantic conception of truth as a correspondence theory of truth in the weak
(Aristotelian) sense of 'correspondence'.
4 See Niiniluoto (1994).
5 For ajustification of the principles and a slightly more formal treatment of the topic, see Koh'li' (1996b).
6 See Bealer (1982), Tichy (1988), and Cresswell (1985).
7 Cf. Bealer (1982).
8 Cf. Davidson (1969).
9 See G(\del (1944) and Neale (1995).
78 PETRKOLAR

to See Kolat (1998).

11 See Kolat (1996a, 1996b).
12 See Bealer (1982) and Tichy (1988). Bealer introduces so-called condition-building trees which result in
conditions that obtain. Tichy introduces constructions of various kinds as 'ontologized' ways of arriving at
entities by means of some other entities.
13 See Kolat (1996b). For an introduction to mereology see Simons (1987).
14 Cf. Tarski (1931, Lemma B on p.198).
IS Cf. Tarski (1931, definitions 22-23).
16 Cf Kirkham (1992, pp.l60-161).
17 Cf. Tarski (1931, fu.l on p.l94). For example, a chain of equivalences similar to the following one can be
constructed for each predicate and each individual constant of L: 'Pa' is true[-in-L] if and only if'Pa' is
satisfied by all sequences (by the truth definition) ifand only ifthere is a sequence,/, which satisfies 'Pa' (by
Tarski's Lemma B) if and only if there is a sequence,/, which satisfies '3YI(PyI & Yl=a)' (by logic) if and
only if there is a sequence, r, such that r differs fromfin at most the 1st place and r satisfies '(Pyl & YI=a)'
(by the definition of satisfaction).
18 Cf Field (1972). We get equivalences like
'Pa' is true ifand only if it is satisfied by all sequences ifand only ifthere is an a to which P applies.
19 Davidson (1990, p.299).
20 The truth defmition for closed atomic sentences is usually put as follows. 'P(al, .... ,an)' is true in Miff
<l(al), .. .J(a.»e I(P).
21 Cf Gabbay and Guenthner (1983, p.54) where such a set of sequences is called the truth-value of<ll inM.
22 Proof: For all closed sentences y, it holds that if y is true then Iy I=S where S is the set of all sl:9uences (in
M). Then from Tarski's definition of consequence (see Tarski (1936, p.417)), it follows that if I<II~ = S I
then I<III = s.
23 I am indebted to I1kka Niiniluoto and Jan Wolenski for having triggered my interest in the present topic.
My thanks go to Jaroslav Peregrin and Timothy Childers for their comments on the earlier drafts of this
paper.

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Cresswell, Max 1.: 1985, Structured Meanings: The Semantics of Propositional Attitudes, Cambridge
(Mass.), MIT Press.
Davidson, Donald: 1969, 'True to the Facts', Journal ofPhilosophy 21.
Davidson, Donald: 1990, 'The Structure and Content of Truth' ,Journal ofPhilosophy 6.
Field, Hartry: 1972, 'Tarski's Theory ofTruth', Journal ofPhilosophy 13.
Gabbay, Dov M. and Guenthner, Franz (eds.): 1983, Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Vol. I: Elements of
Classical Logic, Dordrecht, Reidel.
GOdel, Kurt: 1944, 'Russell's Mathematical Logic', in Schillp P. (ed.), The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell,
Evanston, Northwestern University Press.
Kirkham, Richard L.: 1992, Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press.
Kolat, Petr: 1996a, 'On Truth: Correspondence, Coherence, Compromise', Konigsberg 1.
Kolat, Petr: 1996b, 'Corresponding to What?', in Childers, Kolat, and Svoboda (eds.), Logica '95:
Proceedings ofthe 9th International Symposium, Prague, Filosofia.
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Kolal', Petr: 1998, 'Correspondence, Satisfaction and Dangerous Connectives', in Childers T. (ed.), The
Logica Yearbook 1997, Prague, Filosofia.
Neale, Stephen: 1995, The Philosophical Significance ofGOdel's Slingshot', Mind 104 (416).
Niiniluoto, Ilkka: 1994, 'Defending Tarski against His Critics', in Twardowski and Wolenski (eds.), Sixty
Years of Tarski 's Definition of Truth, Krakow, PHILED.
Pendlebury, Michael: 1986, 'Facts as Truthmakers', Monist 69.
Simons, Peter: 1987, Parts. A Study in Ontology. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Tarski, Alfred: 1931, 'The Concept ofTruth in Formalized Languages', in Tarski (1956).
Tarski, Alfred: 1936, 'On the Concept of Logical Consequence', in Tarski (1956).
Tarski, Alfred: 1944, 'The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics', in Zabeeh,
Klemke, and Jacobson (eds.), Readings in Semantics, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1974
(originally published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, 1944).
Tarski, Alfred: 1954, 'Contribution to the Theory of Models 1', Indigationes Mathematicae 16.
Tarski, Alfred: 1956, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Tichy, Pavel: 1988, The Foundations ofFrege 's Logic, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter.
van Fraassen, Bas: 1975, 'Facts and tautological entailments', in Anderson and Belnap (eds.), Entailment,
Vol. I, Princeton, Princeton University Press.
Wolenski, Jan and Simons, Peter: 1989, 'De Veritate: Austro-Polish Contributions to the Theory of Truth
from Brentano to Tarski', in Szaniawski (ed.), The Vienna Circle and the Lvov-Warsaw School,
Dordrecht, Kluwer.
 FREDERICK STOUTLAND

DO WE NEED CORRESPONDENCE TRUTH?

1. By correspondence truth, I mean a conception of truth which takes 'true' to be (a)

a genuine predicate, which (b) denotes a property which a truth bearer possesses (c)
in virtue of its relation ( correspondence) to what it is about, (d) independently of our
knowledge of what it is about. Truth is a property but it is so constituted by a relation
as to be itself a kind of relation. It is like being a father, which is a property
constituted by a man's fatherhood relation to others.
While this has been the dominant conception of truth from Plato to recent
analytic philosophy, my view is that its claims should be rejected and that we should
accept the resulting deflationist conception of truth. In this paper I will support that
view by arguing that correspondence truth serves no legitimate needs.

2. On a deflationary view of the kind I have in mind, there is no such thing as a truth
property because 'true' is not a predicate, except on a superficial syntactical level,
the level, for example, on which 'nobody' (as in 'Nobody passed me on the road') is
a singular term. Indeed, 'true' does not affect either the sense or the force of an
expression in which it occurs, for it is not used to refer to or characterize anything.
'It is true that Harry is in bed' and 'Harry is in bed' have the same sense (involve
exactly the same objects and properties) in every context - whether they occur free-
standing or embedded in other expressions (for instance, conditionals), whether they
are asserted or denied, questioned or commanded. Utterances of them also have the
same force: to asserl 'It is true that Harry is in bed' is just to assert 'Harry is in
bed'. The same holds for every kind offorce: to ask if Harry is in bed is also to ask if
it is true that Harry is in bed, and so on. We might put the general point by saying
that 'true' has no substantive content of its own. The equivalence thesis follows
immediately; since 'p is true' has the same substantive content as 'p', 'p is true' is
equivalent to 'p'. Hence believing p is equivalent to believing that p is true, doubting
p is equivalent to doubting that p is true, wondering whether p is equivalent to
wondering whether p is true, and so on2 •
This does not mean that the equivalence thesis tells us all there is to know about
truth; if it did, 'true' would be eliminable (redundant), which it is not. Expressions
can play an essential role - can express a concept - even if they have no role in
referring, predicating, or indicating force. 'Either-or' and 'if-then' are examples, and
so is 'exists', which looks like a predicate, but, as Kant pointed out, is not. Like these
examples, 'true' is not eliminable, even though it does not express a property or
indicate force, and like them, it plays a structural role in sentences. Unlike them, it

81
J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), 81-90.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
82 FREDERICK STOUTLAND

makes no contribution of its own to the sense of sentences in which it occurs because
unlike them, it has no substantive content of its own. What, then, is its role and what
kind of concept is it?
The deflationist account of truth I favor is the pro-sentential accoune. It holds
that 'true' is an anaphoric expression, that is, one whose role is to articulate (or
institute) connections between expressions and which derives (or inherits) its content
from an antecedent expression. Pronouns are the most familiar kind of anaphoric
expressions: they articulate connections between expressions referring to things or
people and inherit their content entirely from antecedent nouns. E.g., in 'John is sick,
and he cannot come', 'he' derives its content entirely from the antecedent 'John' and
refers only to whomever 'John' refers to. Although 'he' has no content of its own, it
is not eliminable, for if we simply said 'John is sick and John cannot come', it might
not be clear whether both occurrences of 'John' refer to the same person.
Another case where pronouns are not eliminable is their quantificational (or
generalizing) use, as in 'If a number is prime, it is not divisible by two'. Here 'it'
articulates a connection between expressions and derives its content entirely from its
antecedent expression, which in this case determines a class, any member of which
may be the antecedent of 'it'. Since the members of the class cannot be listed, there
is no way of eliminating the 'it'. Pro-nouns generally have this role of connecting
expressions, a role which is conceptual and bears on the content of sentences, even
though their own content derives only from antecedents.
A pro-sentence is an anaphoric sentence, which derives its content, not from an
antecedent noun but from an antecedent sentence. The pro-sentential account claims
that the essential role of 'true' is to enable us to form pro-sentences, which articulate
(or institute) connections in our discourse. For example, 'What John said is true' is a
pro-sentence; that whole sentence derives its content from an antecedent sentence,
namely, one which John uttered earlier. It asserts just what John asserted without
repeating it4. 'It is true that Harry is in bed' is another example: the whole sentence is
a pro-sentence, formed by the use of 'it is true' and deriving its content from the
contained sentence ('Harry is in bed').
Many pro-sentences play an inessential role in that they can be eliminated in
favor of sentences which do not contain 'true'. 'It is true that Harry is in bed' derives
its content from the contained sentence, 'Harry is in bed', and uttering the latter is as
good as uttering the former. The same may hold for 'What John said is true': if John
said, 'Today is Thursday', we can do without 'is true' by saying, 'John said that
today is Thursday and today is Thursday', which suffers only from repetition. But if
we do not know exactly what John said but nevertheless want to endorse it, 'is true'
is not eliminable. Prosentences are ineliminable in quantificational (generalizing)
contexts, where we say things like 'An omniscient being believes only what is true';
'is true' is essential to that sentence because we cannot formulate all the sentences an
omniscient being believes. The same holds for sentences like 'All the logical
consequences of a true sentence must be true' or 'Not all true sentences in arithmetic
are provable'. Such pro-sentences function like pro-nouns of quantification, and they
(and the truth expressions which make them possible) are ineliminable for the same
 DO WE NEED CORRESPONDENCE TRUTH? 83

reasons 5 .
I shall not spell out the details of an anaphoric account of 'true' nor shall I defend
it. I want only to put on the table an account according to which 'true' plays an
essential role but not one which is predicative, force-indicating, or involves any
substantive content of its own, in order to sharpen the question of whether we need
correspondence truth. I shall discuss and criticize four arguments that we do.

3. The first is that correspondence truth is just common sense and its rejection is
paradoxical. A deflationary account, it is argued, denies that truth-bearers have a
truth-relation to the world, which is a radical proposal for a new concept of truth.
Surely, we say such things as the following. 'Whether your assertion about when the
train arrives is true depends on when the train arrives.' 'If you think Oswald shot
Kennedy, your belief about that tragedy is true.' Such everyday expressions imply
that 'true' denotes a relation between truth-bearers and the world, and to deny it is to
cut language and thought off from the world.
The response to this is that a deflationary account of truth does not deny such
truisms; what it denies are theories about them. Every true belief or assertion is
related to a correlative state of affairs, namely, the one spelled out in the equivalence
thesis. That my assertion that the train arrives at 8 is true if and only if the train
arrives at 8 is guaranteed by the equivalence thesis. We might even sum it up by
saying that whether my assertion that the train arrives at 8 is true depends on whether
the train arrives at 8 - just because the anaphoric conception of truth holds that the
content of ' it is true thatp' depends on the content of'p'.
But these elaborations of the equivalence thesis do not imply a correspondence
theory. On the anaphoric account, to assert that it is true that the train arrives at 8 is a
way of asserting that the train arrives at 8, and hence the truth claim must depend on
the claim about when the train arrives, and hence on when the train arrives, since that
is what the claim is about. The correspondence theory puts it differently; its view is
that to assert that it is true that the train arrives at 8 is to assert (or imply) that the
assertion (or proposition) that the train arrives at 8 corresponds to what it is about.
That way of putting it goes far beyond the truisms we started with.
The different ways these truisms are construed can be illustrated by considering
interpretations of Tarski's work on truth. Tarski's 'semantic conception of truth' is
best viewed as a formal systematization of a deflationary account of truth, not as a
correspondence theory. Tarski gave as the definition of 'true sentence', 'satisfied by
all sequences', which, if we read 'satisfied by' as 'correspond to', would mean that a
true sentence corresponds to all sequences. That is hardly a correspondence theory,
for it would mean that all true sentences correspond to the same thing.
Davidson, who made this last point, also argued at one time 6 that Tarski's theory
can be called a correspondence theory because it sees truth as constituted by a
relation between words and the world - not, indeed, a relation between sentences and
the world, for the reason just mentioned - but a relation between predicates and the
objects that satisfy them. Since a predicate is not satisfied by all objects but only by a
specified set, there is room for the claim that satisfaction is a relation between
84 FREDERICK STOUTLAND

predicates and objects in the world. Given Tarski's defmition of truth in terms of
satisfaction, there is room for the claim that truth itself is a relation between language
and the world.
Satisfaction is not, however, the kind of relation needed for a correspondence
theory. Tarski did not define 'satisfaction' by a general formula nor did he specify
criteria for its application. He did not say, for example, that what satisfies a predicate
is the set of things it is true of (which would be question-begging in a definition of
'true'). All he did was give a list: objects x satisfy (in a given language) predicate 'y'
if and only if: (1) 'y' is 'red' and x's are red; (2) 'y' is 'green' and x's are green; (3)
'y' is 'bam' and x's are barns, and so on for every predicate in the language.
'Satisfaction' is 'defmed' by such a list, by writing down a name of each predicate
and matching with it an expression that denotes a set of objects, and all we know of
satisfaction for a language is such a list.
This means that Tarski does not treat satisfaction as a relation with a nature
which constitutes its instances, which truth must be according to the correspondence
theory. There is for each predicate a set of objects to which it is related, but the fact
that this is merely set out in a list shows that for a predicate to be satisfied by a set of
objects does not require that satisfaction be a relation which determines its instances.
Indeed, it is rather the other way around: the instances determine the relation because
there is nothing more to satisfaction than the pairs of predicates and objects in the list
for a given language7 •
Hartry Field has argued that on this interpretation, Tarski fails to realize his goal
of reducing semantic notions to non-semantic ones8. Field wants to make a
correspondence theory out of Tarski's results and then show that correspondence is a
physical relation on the basis of satisfaction being physical. But that requires treating
satisfaction as a constitutive relation, which Tarski didn't do. If we take seriously a
deflationary approach, we can see how Tarski reduced semantic notions to non-
semantic ones: he reduced truth to satisfaction, and then defined 'satisfaction' by a
list which correlated names of predicates with names of sequences of objects, none
of which are semantical notions 9 •

4. The second argument that we need correspondence truth is that the concept of
truth has to be used to explain various things, which is not possible if we accept a
deflationary account like the anaphoric one. One version holds that we need
correspondence truth to explain why if we act on true beliefs, we get what we want
much more often than if we act on false beliefs. The claim that truth furthers success
has been challenged, but that isn't necessary to undermine the need for
correspondence truth. Say that the reason I have success in the stock market is
because I have true beliefs about the profitability of companies like GE or MCI. One
can say as well that the reason for my success is because (a) I believed that GE
would be profitable and GE was profitable, (b) I believed that MCI would be
profitable and MCI was profitable, and so on. To avoid listing the beliefs, we can use
'true' to formulate generalizations about them (use it 'quantificationally'), which is
just what the anaphoric conception takes to be a central role for the concept. We
 DO WE NEED CORRESPONDENCE TRUTH? 85

need 'true' to make a generalization about why I am successful but that doesn't
require that it be a predicate.
Another version of the argument is that we need a concept of truth to give an
explanation of the meaning of sentences or the content of thoughts. "What [our
thoughts] are about," writes Nagel, "depends ... on what has to be referred to in any
explanation of what makes them true.,,10 But only correspondence truth gives us the
explanatory kind of truth conditions needed here.
It is correct that an anaphoric conception of truth does not allow for such an
explanatory use of truth conditions, for it holds that the role of 'true' is to form
prosentences, which derive their content only from antecedents. These antecedents
cannot (on pain ofinfmite regress) all be prosentences, and those which are not must
have their content explained without reference to a concept of truth, the reason being
that we cannot use a concept of truth (or of truth conditions) to explain content, if the
concept of truth requires antecedents which already have content. To put the point in
other words: truth conditions cannot account for the content of sentences generally
since there are no truth conditions unless there are already sentences with content.
It doesn't follow that understanding a sentence cannot be characterized as
understanding its truth conditions, for, given the equivalence thesis, to understand p
is to understand what it is for p to be true, that is, to understand the truth conditions
of p. But this concept of truth conditions has nothing to do with correspondence
truth; it does not refer to what would make a sentence true, to the property whereby a
sentence would be made true, or to the state of affairs we have to grasp to understand
a sentence. Rather, to understand the truth conditions of a sentence is to understand
what it could be used to assert, hence to understand its assertible content, the content
it has even when not being used assertively but with the force of a question, a
request, and so on.
The question remains whether we need correspondence truth to explain meaning
and content. It must be noted that this is not the same as asking whether we can do
without notions of meaning or content to explain language or intentional behavior
generallyll. To think it is the same is to assume that only correspondence truth
conditions can yield an acceptable notion of meaning and content. But there are lots
of other ways to develop such an account. Peirce's definition of belief, for example,
makes no use of a concept of truth. Coherentists always define judgment without
reference to truth. Wittgenstein, of course, famously characterized meaning in terms
of use. Sellars gave an account of meaning in terms of the inferential powers of
sentences plus language-entry and language-exit transitions. While Davidson appeals
to the notion of truth in his theory of meaning and attacks a deflationary conception,
his theory of meaning makes no use of correspondence truth as a relation which
constitutes a truth property. On his view, meaning is essentially a matter of
inferential connections among sentences, and the point of a theory of meaning is to
articulate these connections recursively.

5. The third argument that we need correspondence truth is that truth is the sort of
thing which must be explained: there must be something which makes a true belief
86 FREDERICK STOUTLAND

(or assertion) true, something in virtue of which it is true. Correspondence truth can
be explained in this sense, but truth on the deflationary conception cannot, for there
is nothing to explain.
Russell once wrote in defense of the correspondence theory that if truth is not "a
property wholly dependent upon the relation of the beliefs to outside things", then it
would have to be an intrinsic property, in which case "we could discover whether a
belief was true just by attending to the belief itself.,,12 Russell's point is a truism in
recent analytic philosophy. Here is Dummett: "The correspondence theory expresses
one important feature of the concept of truth which is not expressed by [the
equivalence thesis]: ... that a statement is true only if there is something in virtue of
which it is true.,,13 The alternatives are that 'true' denotes a property for which there
is no explanation, so that truth is arbitrary, which is absurd, or that it is a property
intrinsic to the belief, which might hold for necessary truth but surely not for
contingent.
From the point of view of a deflationary account, however, this argument simply
begs the question, for it assumes that truth is a property. If 'true' denotes a property,
then there must be something which makes a belief true rather than false, for the
alternatives - that the property is arbitrary or intrinsic - are unacceptable. But if truth
is not a property, then it is question-begging to require an explanation why a belief
has it. There can be nothing in virtue of which a belief has the truth property if 'true'
does not function as a property-ascribing predicate.
The anaphoric account holds both that 'true' has an essential role and that there
can be nothing which makes a belief true. Even critics of the correspondence theory
find this difficult to accept, for they worry that something essential is missing if we
just drop the making-true idea. The worry should be taken seriously, and to do that
we cannot simply suppress the question of what makes a belief true; we have to
reformulate it in a way consistent with the denial that 'true' denotes a property.
To do so, we should attend not only to the distinction between the true and the
false - to what makes a belief true rather than false - for the distinction between p's
being true and p's being false is, on a deflationary account, just the distinction
between p and not p, and what worries us here is not how to explain negation. We
should also attend to the distinction between correct and incorrect belief (or
assertion), that is, to the distinction between true and erroneous (or mistaken) belief
- and hence to what makes a belief true rather than erroneous. Whereas the
distinction between the true and the false applies to what is believed (asserted), the
distinction between the true and the erroneous (between truth and error) applies to
our believing (or asserting)14, and it is this distinction which is the real source of the
worry that a deflationary conception of truth leaves out something essential in
rejecting the notion of making-true.
The worry persists because of three assumptions. The first is that there must be
something in virtue of which a belief is correct - something which makes a belief
true rather than erroneous. The second is that what makes a belief (our believing
something) correct must include that what is believed is true, what makes it incorrect
(erroneous) must include that what is believed is false l5 . The third is that the second
 DO WE NEED CORRESPONDENCE TRUTH? 87

assumption requires a non-deflationary conception of truth, in particular, a

correspondence conception. Together these assumptions amount to the claim that
since there must be something in virtue of which a belief is true rather than
erroneous, there must also be something in virtue of which a belief is true rather
than false. That is the claim that should be rejected - we don't need a concept of
making-true in order to have a concept of making-correct - but that requires
rejecting at least one of these three assumptions.
The first should not be rejected; the distinction between correct and incorrect
belief is substantive and normative, and hence there must be something which makes
a belief correct rather than incorrece 6 • Nor should the second. The concepts of
correct and incorrect (of truth and error) must not be confused with the concepts of
truth and falsity, but they are necessarily connected in that what makes a belief
(assertion) correct must include that what is believed (asserted) is true, and what
makes it incorrect must include that what is believed (asserted) is false 17 • To believe
truly rather than erroneously requires believing what is true rather than what is false.
It is the third assumption which is problematic, namely, that a deflationist conception
of truth can play no role in accounting for the distinction between correct and
incorrect belief. This brings us to the final argument that we need correspondence
truth.

6. Defenders of the correspondence theory claim that the distinction between truth
and error must be made in terms of correspondence truth. Since that distinction is
substantive, it must, they argue, be defined in terms of truth understood as having a
substantive content of its own. I reject that claim, first, because using
correspondence truth to define the distinction raises more problems than it solves
and, second, because an acceptable account of the distinction can be given in terms
of a deflationist (e.g., anaphoric) conception of truth.
I shall gesture briefly at only one problem raised by the use of correspondence
truth in this context. If correctness is defined in terms of correspondence truth, then
reasons for thinking a belief is justified will not be reasons for thinking the belief is
correct, unless they are also reasons for thinking the belief is true in the
correspondence sense. Typical reasons for thinking a belief is justified include its
explanatory power, simplicity, congruence with other beliefs, acceptance by the best
authorities, etc. But none of these is a reason for thinking a belief is true in the
correspondence senseIS, and hence, since correct belief requires correspondence
truth, none is a reason for thinking the belief is correct. The result is an unacceptable
gap between a belief's being justified and its being correct to believe it.
To overcome the gap, it must be maintained that the correspondence truth of a
belief is itself a reason for thinking we are justified in the belief since only such a
reason would also be a reason for thinking the belief is correct. But the idea of a
belief whose correspondence truth can itself be a reason for our believing it commits
us to truths which self-evidently correspond to the world, which is a foundationalist
thesis we should reject.
If correspondence truth (without foundational ism) is not adequate to distinguish
88 FREDERICK STOUTLAND

correct from incorrect belief, must we tum to a deflationary conception? A

possibility I have not discussed, which I shall mention briefly, is epistemic
conceptions of truth - the coherence theory, pragmatism, contemporary anti-realism
- substantive conceptions which are distinguished by their defining true (versus
false) in terms of correctness (rather than the other way around): a true belief is just
one it would be correct to believe. These normative conceptions of truth eliminate
the gap the correspondence theory opens up between justification and correctness
because, given that truth is what it would be correct to believe, they are free to take
as a criterion of correctness ideal justification. Clearly there need be no gap between
justification and ideal justification: our being justified in believingp is a good reason
for thinking we may be ideally justified in believing it.
The difficulty with using an epistemic conception of truth to distinguish correct
from incorrect belief is that it trivializes the second assumption mentioned above,
namely, that what makes a belief correct must include that what is believed is true.
This is so because on the epistemic claim that a true belief is one it would be correct
to believe, the assumption reduces to the notion that what makes a belief correct is
that it is one it would be correct to believe, which is entirely empty.
That leaves the concept of truth understood anaphorically (or in some other
deflationary sense) as the only one we can use in distinguishing correct from
incorrect belief and still preserve the claim that what makes a belief correct must
include that what is believed is true. Bur perhaps the concept of truth is not adequate.
Perhaps we must characterize the correct-incorrect distinction entirely without the
concept of truth, or take the route of rejecting the concept of correctness altogether
and get along only with concepts of true andjustifzed belieP9.
What makes these alternatives seem attractive is the thought that if one uses truth
understood in a deflationary sense in characterizing the correct-incorrect distinction,
then the latter can be neither substantive nor normative; consequently, the notion of
what makes a belief correct will be as empty as the notion of what makes a belief
true. But the thought should be resisted.
Although on a deflationary conception, truth is neither substantive nor normative,
belief is (and so is assertion), and that accounts for the substantive and normative
character of the distinction between correct and incorrect belief (or assertion). Truth
understood in a deflationary sense cannot be used to characterize or explain belief or
assertion, and so another concept - a normative one, like inferential role - must play
the key role in characterizing and explaining them20 • As a result, they are construed
as inescapably normative. 21 But it is not truth which makes belief and assertion
normative, nor is it what makes the distinction between correct and incorrect belief a
normative distinction. What the concept of truth does is mark the presence of what is
necessary for a belief (or assertion) to be correct. It does this, not by designating a
truth relation in which the belief stands - there is no such thing - but by connecting
in discourse the (content of the) belief with the particular factors which make that
belief correct. That is why we can say that what makes a belief correct must include
the truth of what is believed.
What lies behind this is the crucial point that on an anaphoric conception, the
 DO WE NEED CORRESPONDENCE TRUTH? 89

really significant role for a truth concept is to link up discourse so as to enable

certain kinds of generalization. Ifwe are content (and if it is possible) to spell out the
instances of a generalization in a given context, we do not need the truth concept in
that context. Thus the claims being considered here - it is correct to believe p only if
'p' is true, and 'p"s being true must be a part of what makes the belief that p correct
- involve a generalization, and that is why 'is true' turns up in them. Ifwe spell out
the instances of the generalization, we do not need to use a truth locution. The
following, for example, say all we have to say about the correctness of the beliefs
involved:
- It is correct to believe that today is Thursday only if today is Thursday, and
today's being Thursday must be part of what makes that belief correct.
- It is correct to believe that Harry is in bed only if Harry is in bed, and Harry's
being in bed must be part of what makes that belief correct.
The concept of correct belief in those sentences is normative, and what the
instances of the truth generalization do is show that a necessary condition for
satisfying the particular norms for the beliefs in question is that the world is a
particular way. The concept of truth simply enables us to say that in a general way; it
does not enable us to ascribe any properties or relations other than the ones there
already are in the world.

University 0/ Helsinki and St. Dla/College

NOTES
1 'Assert', not 'say': to say 'It is true that Harry is in bed' is not necessarily to assert 'Harry is in bed'.
2 The equivalence thesis does not entail that sentences must have a truth value. 'Is Harry in bed?' has no
truth value, unless it is being used to make an assertion. 'Harry is in bed' has a truth value, unless it is
being used to give a command (for instance). Declarative sentences are presumed to have truth value
because they are presumed to be assertible; if that presumption is mistaken for some reason in some
context, then the sentence lacks a truth value in that context. This presumption must be taken for granted
in using the equivalence thesis; the thesis does not apply to sentences which do not meet it.
) Developed by Dorothy Grover and first published in the classic paper she wrote with Belnap and Camp
in Philosophical Studies for February, 1975. For more discussion see Grover's A Prosentential Theory of
Truth, Princeton University Press, 1992.
4 Note that 'What John said is true' is a pro-sentence which contains a pro-noun (,what'); as a pro-
sentence, it is the whole sentence which is connected anaphorically with an antecedent sentence, not the
pronoun in it. The analysis is not that 'what John said' anaphorically refers to John's earlier utterance
and says of it that it is true; that would be to take the anaphoric expression as a pro-noun. Rather' What
John said is true' is what anaphorically refers to his earlier utterance; the anaphoric expression is the
whole pro-sentence. Note too that it is not the presence of 'is true' which makes the utterance assertive;
'What John said was silly' is also assertive. 'Is true' does in this context endorse what John said, but it
does not do that in many other contexts, for example, 'If what John said is true, then he is in trouble'.
5 Generalizations of this kind are of particular interest to philosophers, which is one reason why they
tend, rightly, to resist claims that 'true' is eliminable or redundant. The burden of this paper, however, is
that it is a mistake to think that a notion so indispensable to philosophical reflection must carry a
substantive content.
90 FREDERICK STOUTLAND

6 'True to the Facts' in Journal o/Philosophy, 1969.

7 Quine explains this point very elegantly in his From Stimulus to Science, Harvard University Press,
1995, pp. 65ff. My claim that Tarski does not treat satisfaction - or truth - as a relation with a nature
which constitutes its instances is a useful way of saying that he does not treat 'true' as designating a
property. It undermines the objection that 'true' must designate a property since every set of objects
determines a property, and so the set of true sentences must determine a truth property. That objection
can be granted (assuming it is not paradoxical to speak of the set of true sentences) since properties in
that sense come free, and any set of sentences will have an infinite number. In the sense of property in
which having been uttered in Helsinki in December or containing the letter 'n' are properties of sets of
sentences, a deflationist conception can grant that truth is a property. But that is not relevant to what a
deflationist conception denies (and what a correspondence theory affirms), namely, that truth is a
property constituted by the correspondence relation and which constitutes as true any sentence which is
true.
S 'Tarski's Theory of Truth' in The Journal 0/ Philosophy, 1972.
9 There are, that is, no semantical terms in the list following the' if and only if which is the definition of
'satisfies' - e.g., 'name' is not in the definition (only the names of predicates and objects).
10 The View From Nowhere, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 69.
II As is claimed by 'eliminativists' in the philosophy of mind.
12Problems 0/ Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1912, p. 123. He is criticizing a view Moore once
held.
I3 'Truth' in G. Pitcher, ed. Truth, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964, p. 106. (Dummett's emphasis.)
14 This point might be put by saying 'true' is ambiguous in that it expresses one concept in a context
where it is contrasted with falsity and another in a context where it is contrasted with error I argue below
that these two concepts are necessarily connected.
15 For an assertion to be correct, more is required than that what is uttered be true, for even madmen may
utter what is true without having made a correct assertion if their madness prevents their utterance from
being an assertion at all. An analogous point can be made about beliefs: a madman may say he believes
such and such a true claim but it does not follow that he has a correct belief: he would not have a correct
belief if his madness has undermined his capacity for having genuine beliefs.
16 The points quoted above from Russell and Dummett, while they do not apply to the true-false
distinction, do apply to the truth-error distinction.
17 Or at least not true (if the sentence is not assertible in the context).
18The arguments clearly needed here are left out for lack of space. There is surely no direct connection
between these factors and correspondence truth; the connection would require extensive epistemological
and metaphysical commitments, all of which I regard as dubious.
19 Epistemic conceptions of truth illustrate both alternatives. Peirce defined correct belief without any
reference to truth, as what the community of inquirers would settle on in the long run (which he then
used to define truth). Many relativists simply do away with correctness in favor of justification, arguing
that since justification is relative, so is truth.
20 For discussions of this point (and much else related to this paper), see Robert Brandom's Making It
ExpliCit, Harvard University Press, 1994, esp. Chapter 5.
21 Much more so than when they are characterized in terms of correspondence truth: believing p is
accepting p as true; asserting p is uttering it so as to show one intends it to be taken as true. Since
correspondence truth may not be construed as normative at all (as it is not by physicalists like Field), the
characterization may leave the correct-incorrect distinction without its normative character.
 ILKKA NIINILUOTO

TARSKIAN TRUTH AS CORRESPONDENCE-

REPLIES TO SOME OBJECTIONS

In this paper I argue for the thesis that Alfred Tarski's original definition of truth,
together with its later elaboration in model theory, is an explicate of the classical
correspondence theory of truth. In defending Tarski against some of his critics (see also
Niiniluoto, 1994), I wish to show how this account of truth can be formulated,
understood, and further developed in a philosophically satisfactory way. My overall
aim is to employ the non-epistemic correspondence account of truth as a basis of the
concept of truth likeness (verisimilitude), which in turn is an indispensable ingredient of
the philosophical programme of critical scientific realism (see Niiniluoto, 1984, 1987,
forthcoming).

1. TRUTH IN MODEL THEORY

In the latter part of the 19th century, mathematicians started to study the
'satisfiability' (Realisierbarkeit) of algebraic and geometrical axioms in different
systems or structures. Model theory, as a branch of mathematical logic, is an outgrowth
of such studies (Hodges, 1986). Many important results were achieved after 1915 by
Leopold Lowenheim, Thoralf Skolem, and Kurt Godel - even before the intuitive
notions of satisfaction and truth were made precise by Alfred Tarski in the early 1930s
(see Vaught, 1974( In a mature form, model theory was formulated by Tarski in the
1950s (see Tarski, 1954-55; Tarski and Vaught, 1957), and it has become the standard
defmition of truth in textbooks of mathematical logic (see, for example, Monk, 1976).
In model theory, truth is defmed as a relation between the sentences of a given
language L and a set-theoretical structure W. Usually L is a first-order language. The
link between Land W is established by an interpretation function I which maps the
non-logical constants of L into the domain X of W (i.e., the function I maps individual
constants to elements of X, predicates to subsets of X and relations on X, and function
symbols to functions in X). The truth defmition for an atomic sentence with a two-place
predicate Q is then

(1) W F Q(aJ,a2) if and only if<l(at),!(a2» E I(Q),

and for a disjunctive sentence A v B

91
J Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), 91-104.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
92 ILKKA NIINILUOTO

(2) W FA v B if and only if W FA or W F B.

When L contains quantifiers, first the concept of satisfaction (of a formula relative to a
sequence of elements of X) is defmed by recursion on the syntactical complexity of
formulas. Then the concept of truth (of a sentence) is defmed as satisfaction by one
(and, hence, by every) sequence of elements ofX2.
An L-structure W is often defmed as a pair (X,I), consisting of the domain X and the
interpretation function I from L to X (e.g., Monk, 1976). Language L is then an
uninterpreted syntactical entity which becomes interpreted via W. Variation of X and I
gives us the class of all L-structures that can be distinguished by the type of the
vocabulary of L3. Alternatively, given an enumeration of the non-logical symbols of
language L (individual constants, one-place predicates, two-place predicates, etc.), an
L-structure can be characterized as a relational system W= (X, s ..... , D ..... , R ..... ), i.e., a
domain X with designated elements SJ, ... , subsets DJ, ... , relations RJ, ... etc. This is the
approach favoured by Tarski (see Tarski, 1954-55), who does not make the
interpretation function I explicit. However, it is clear that also here a function I from L
to W is presupposed, so that the designated elements of Ware the I-images of the
vocabulary of L.
In mathematics, L might be the language of formal arithmetic and W the structure of
natural numbers. The truth values of arithmetical statements in L depend on their
relations to the arithmetical facts in the 'standard model' W. The same treatment can be
repeated relative to other structures W' of the same type, obtained by using different
intrepretation functions with the same domain of natural numbers, or by choosing
different domains. It is essential that the interpretation function establishes a link
between linguistic entities and a domain of extra-linguistic objects. In this sense, truth
in arithmetic is based upon a 'correspondence' between language and mathematical
reality (Niiniluoto, 1992).
Tarski recognized that the liar paradox rebuts the attempt to assign a truth predicate
to the whole of our 'colloquial' language. This does not mean that he was "thoroughly
sceptical" about the applicability of his semantical theory to natural languages (pace
Haack, 1978, p. 120). Tarski (1944) pointed out that, besides formal languages in the
logician's sense, also portions or fragments of natural language (including languages of
special sciences) may at least approximately satisty the condition that their syntax is
well-defmed, and the truth values of their sentences can be consistently discussed in a
suitable metalanguage (cf Wolenski, 1993). He also gave examples where his
semantics is applied to sentences of natural language (e.g., 'Snow is white').
When model-theoretic semantics is applied to a fragment L of natural language, we
can again speak about the truth of sentences of L in L-structures W. If X* is a domain of
objects existing in the actual world, and if the interpretation function 1* maps the
syntactical entities of L to their extensions in the domain X*, then a sentence of L is
actually true if it is true in W* = (X* ,1*) (cf. LePore, 1983).
 TARSKIAN TRUTH AS CORRESPONDENCE 93

2. TARSKI'S EARLY SEMANTICS

The philosophical debates about Tarski's theory of truth usually refer to his 1936 and
1944 papers. It is, therefore, instructive to compare their content with the model-
theoretic notion of truth.
Tarski's 1936 paper works out a recursive defmition of satisfaction for the language
of the calculus of classes. In this case, the objects in the sequences are classes (sets). He
also sketches the defmition for languages of fmite order, which include as a special case
the fIrst-order languages familiar in model theory.
The differences between model theory and Tarski's early work in semantics have
been sharply emphasized by Wilfrid Hodges (1986). He argues that the key idea of
model theory was completely missing in Tarski's classical 1936 paper: "the notion of
an uninterpreted constant symbol which gets an interpretation by being applied to a
particular structure". Further, he asserts that Tarski's defmition of truth could be
"adjusted" in two ways to make it applicable to fIrst-order languages which distinguish
non-logical constants from other vocabulary: fIrst, by applying it to such languages
"only after they have been interpreted", secondly by treating the non-logical constants
as variables.
However, this argument ignores the fact that Tarski explicitly restricts his attention
to interpreted languages (see Tarski, 1956, p. l66-167t For Tarski, language is
assumed to be interpreted in the domain X'" of all objects, but the interpretation
function is not made explicit. He allows that the same syntactic expression can be true
in one language but false in another (ibid., p. 152), but on his account this amounts to
the existence of two different interpretations and two different languages.
Hodges (1986) argues further that the notion of "structure", and hence "truth in a
structure", appears in Tarski's work only in 1952. Here I disagree with Hodges (cf
Niiniluoto, 1994). It seems to me possible to view Tarski's early account as a special
case of the model-theoretic approach: his classical paper defmes an absolute concept of
truth, where the domain X'" of all objects is assumed to be given. However, with
reference to "the Gottingen school grouped around Hilbert", he points out that there is
also the relative notion of "correct or true sentence in an individual domain a" (Tarski,
1956, p. 199). This means that "we restrict the extension of the individuals considered
to a given class a", where a is a subdomain of X"'. For example, such specifIc domains
may be studied by various special sciences (ibid., p. 239). The absolute notion of truth
means then the same as correctness in "the class of all individuals" (ibid., p. 207).
Wolenski and Simons (1989) see Tarski's preoccupation with the absolute concept
of truth as a philosophical heritage from the Lvov-Warsaw school. It is certainly correct
that Tarski's views were strongly influenced by Twardowski, Kotarbmski, and
Lesniewski, and by their support of the classical Aristotelian defmition of truth as
correspondence between statements and facts (see also Wolenski, 1993). In spite of his
ironical remarks about the "philosophical problem of truth" (see Tarski, 1944), Tarski's
explanations of what he is doing clearly suggest that he is attempting to defme the
concept of actual or material truth, i.e., truth in the actual world. The only feasible
94 ILKKA NIINILUOTO

relativization of this absolute concept amounts to the idea of restricting the relevant
domain of objects.
Tarski starts from the idea that there is one world W*, but many languages L, L', ...
(which may be fragments of different natural languages or languages of formal and
empirical sciences). In his 1935 address on the scientific approach to semantics, Tarski
complained that earlier attempts have proceeded "as though there was only language in
the world" (Tarski, 1956, p. 402). Moreover, a language L as a syntactical entity (i.e.,
the tokens of the expressions of L) is treated as a part of reality. If the expressions of L
have names in the semantic metalanguage ML for L, then ML can express relations
between the linguistic expressions in L and the (rest of the) world W* (see ibid., p.
403). Tarski's examples of such metalinguistic statements which express semantical
relations between language and objects in the world include

(3) The expression 'the victor of Jena' denotes Napoleon.

(4) Snow satisfies the condition 'x is white'.

Another example is the famous T-equivalence, which is Tarski's material adequacy

condition for the defmition of truth (Tarski, 1956, p. 188):

(T) x if and only ifp,

where x is a name of a sentence in L and p is the translation of this sentence in ML. If L

is contained in ML, and names of expressions are formed by quotation marks (Tarski,
1944), we get the well-known instance of (T):

(5) 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white.

When Tarski worked out his defmition of logical consequence (cf. also
Etchemendy, 1988), in his address at the 1935 conference in Paris, he needed the
general concept of model. According to Tarski, a sentence A follows logically from a
class of sentences K if and only if "every model of the class K is also a model of the
sentence A" (Tarski, 1956, p. 417). Further, a sentence is analytical (or logically true) if
and only if "every sequence of objects is a model of it" (ibid., p. 419). But how can a
sentence A in L have different models, if L is already an interpreted language? Tarski
solves this problem by using the second 'adjustment' recommended by Hodges (1986).
Assuming a division between logical and extra-logical constants, replace the
occurrences of the extra-logical constants in sentence A by corresponding variables
(e.g., individual constants by individual variables, predicates by predicate variables).
Let the resulting formula be A'. Then, Tarski says (1956, p. 417), any sequence of
objects which satisfies A' is a model or realization of AS.
It is clear that already at this point the general concept of 'truth in a model' is
presupposed. Tarski does not tell where his 'models' or 'arbitrary sequences of objects'
come from, but it is plausible to assume, in conformity with his 1936 paper, that they
are elements and subclasses of the domainX* of "all objects".
 T ARSKIAN TRUTH AS CORRESPONDENCE 95

Tarski's early work thus occupies a middle position (one world - many languages)
between the two conceptions that Jaakko Hintikka (1997) calls language as a universal
medium (one world - one language) and language as a calculus (many worlds - many
languages) (cf. Kusch, 1989). The colloquial language as a whole has a universal
character (Tarski, 1956, p. 164), but "scientific semantics" is still possible, both for
artificially constructed formal languages and fragments of natural language. For the
latter purpose, the natural language has to be splitted into a hierarchy of metalanguages
(ibid., p. 267). Tarski's 1935 paper on logical consequence makes steps toward the
mature form of model theory, where the basic concept is the relational "truth in a
model". The final step to the full-blown calculus view is taken in the possible worlds
semantics, which gets rid of the one-domain assumption. 6 In this framework, the basic
concept is 'truth in a possible world', and actual or material truth is a special case of the
general conception, obtained by choosing a suitable set-theoretical representation of the
actual world as the relevant model (cf. Section 1).
Some objections to the Tarskian treatment of truth will be discussed in the next
sections.

3. THE FIRST OBJECTION

Claim: Tarski does not defme truth, but only the predicate true-in-L for a variable L. He
does not tell us what these cases for particular languages have in common (Davidson,
1990). Indeed, it is folly even to try to define truth (cf. Putnam, 1994; Davidson, 1996).
Reply: Tarski makes it clear that he is attempting to give an explication of the
classical correspondence theory of truth (see Tarski, 1956, p. 152-155; cf. Woleflski
and Simons, 1989; Kirkham, 1992, p. 170). Explication is not normally achieved by an
explicit defmition (of the form 'truth is .. .'), but rather it progresses step by step from
simpler cases to more complex cases. The paradigmatic applications are extended to
new similar cases so that certain stipulated adequacy conditions are satisfied. This
procedure is familiar from philosophical research programmes that try to explicate
concepts like induction, confirmation, and truthlikeness (cf. Niiniluoto, 1987). It is also
typical that the explication of a relation has to specified in different ways for different
types of applications (for example, see the concept of similarity discussed in Niiniluoto,
1987, Ch. 1).
Tarski's semantical approach to truth (and its continuation by Davidson and others)
follows this pattern of explication. His early paper defmes truth for set theory and first-
order logic, and later the programme is extended to cover new cases, like fragments of
natural language, language of scientific theories, indexical expressions, vague
statements, intensional languages, etc. In all cases, truth presupposes an interpretation
between syntactical entities and structures or domains of objects, recursion on the
complexity of a sentence is employed, and the T -equivalence is put forward as a
condition of material adequacy.
96 ILKKA NIINILUOTO

4. THE SECOND OBJECTION

Claim: Tarski does not illuminate the nature of truth, since his clauses for satisfaction
simply list predicates and classes of objects (Field, 1972). In order to define the
concept of truth, it is not sufficient to specify the class of true sentences in a language
(Stenius, 1989). Tarski does not give us a theory of truth, where truth appears as a
substantial property of sentences or as a genuine language - world relation whose
nature constitutes its instances (Stoutland, 1999). Tarski is forced to use undefmed
semantic terms in his definition, since Convention T presupposes the notion of
translation (Davidson, 1990).
Reply: Tarski gave the general schema for satisfaction

(Sat) Object b satisfies 'x is P' if and only if b is P*,

where p* is the translation of P into the metalanguage (Tarski, 1956, p. 192). This is
parallel to his Convention T for truth. But Sat is only an adequacy condition, and does
not tell how the terms are to be interpreted. As Tarski's defmition is relative to the
interpretation function I, it is correct to say with Field (1972) that Tarski showed how
to reduce the concept of truth to the notion of reference (denotation). Tarski never gave
a theory of reference for singular and general terms, but his account is compatible with
various philosophical views. In particular, in model theory function I need not be based
upon a physical relation, as Field suggests?
Tarski emphasized that the T-equivalence is not a defmition of truth, but rather an
adequacy condition which should follow from a defmition. However, he misleadingly
stated that the infmite conjunction of all T-equivalences in a language L would
constitute a defmition (Tarski, 1956, p. 188). Here we are close to the confusion
between defming the concept of truth and specifying the class of true sentences in a
language (see Stenius, 1989, p. 235). Stenius claims that this confusion was present
with Rudolf Carnap as well (ibid., p. 237). But, in this respect, it seems to me that the
treatment of semantics by Camap in the late 1930s and early 1940s was more
satisfactory than Tarski's (1944) own explanations.
Carnap (1942) makes explicit the designation function des in a semantical system S,
corresponding to the pair (L,1) as an interpreted language. For Carnap, designation is a
language - world relation: individual constants designate individual objects and
predicates designate properties. A recursive defmition parallel to Tarski's conditions
shows how sentences designate propositions. For example, if b designates London and
P designates the property of being large, then P(b) designates the proposition that
London is large (cf. condition (l) above). Composite sentences are treated by clauses of
the type (2). Then the truth of a sentence in a semantical system S is defmed by
condition

(C) Sentence s is true in S if and only if there is a proposition p such that s

designates pinS and p.
 TARSKIAN TRUTH AS CORRESPONDENCE 97

Condition C resembles Tarski's T, but it is clearly stronger than T, since here the
semantical connection between the sentence s and its truth condition p is made explicit
by the relation of designation (meaning, saying). As the designation relation for
sentences is given by Tarski's recursive defmition, it is not here an undefmed semantic
notion. Camap also noted that this formulation refutes the objection that the semantic
defmition "is not general but is given by an enumeration of single cases" (see Schilpp,
1953, p. 901). Indeed, this gives a new reply to objection 1: C is a general schema for
defming the concept of truth, but the designation relation has to be explicated by
proceeding from simpler languages to more complex cases.
Stenius (1989) complains that even meaningless sentences sinS get a truth value by
C, and replaces C by a conditional defmition

(S) If s means pinS, then (s is true in S if and only ifp)

For example,

(5) If 'Schnee ist weiss' says that snow is white, then 'Schnee ist weiss' is true if
and only if snow is white.

But the schema S does not make the concept of truth superfluous in semantics, as
Stenius (1989), p. 208, suggests. Rather, S can be again viewed as making Tarski's
theory explicit: his T-equivalence occurs as the consequent of this conditional
defmition, and its antecedent is a way of expressing that p is the 'translation' of the
object language sentence s. As noted above, this meaning relation is defined by
Tarski's recursive clauses, starting from the interpretation I of terms; hence, the
translation of the German sentence is obtained by linking 'Schnee' to the same entity in
the world that we denote by 'snow' in English.

5. THE THIRD OBJECTION

Claim: Tarski's account expresses only a relation between object language and
metalanguage, so that his theory is merely disquotational (Quine, 1990). When the
object language is included in the metalanguage, T-equivalences are trivial tautologies
(cf. Etchemendy, 1988). If Tarski's T-equivalence expresses a relation between
language and reality, it leads to ontological relativism (Jennings, 1992).
Reply: As we have seen in Section 2, convention T is expressed in terms of the
object language L and the metalanguage ML, but it states something about the relations
between language L and the (rest of) the world. This hold even of the example (5),
which is based upon contingent facts about the use of the terms 'snow' and 'white' in
English. It is a tautology to state that 'snow' means (the same as) 'snow', but it is a fact
of English that 'snow' means snow. Similar remarks can be made about condition S for
satisfaction.
Jennings (1992) defends his charge of ontological relativism by claiming that the T-
sentence
98 ILKKA NIINILUOTO

(5) 'Phlogiston is given off during combustion' is true iff phlogiston is given off
during combustion

commits us to the existence of phlogiston. This is not correct, since equivalence (5) can
be true when both of its constituents are false.

6. THE FOURTH OBJECTION

Claim: Tarskian truth is not correspondence, even though satisfaction is a relation

between linguistic expressions and objects in the world. True sentences are satisfied by
all sequences, and thus do not 'correspond' to any of these (Haack, 1978). The
Tarskian treatment does not mention any entities (like facts) as truth-makers to which
true statements might correspond (Davidson, 1990, 1996).
Reply: In the defmition of satisfaction, sequences of objects are needed to fix the
interpretation of free variables of a formula. For fIrst-order languages, individual
variables are interpreted by sequences of individuals from the domain. Sentences do not
'correspond' to such sequences (Niiniluoto, 1987, pp. 138,479), so that truth-makers
should not be sought among sequences (cf. Kolar, 1999)8.
While Tarski's explication does not mentionfacts as a special ontological category,
in his treatment truth is always defmed relative to an entity which serves as a 'fact'. The
defmition of truth presupposes an interpretation function I which links a language L
with a domain X even for sentences without any variables at all (e.g., condition (1)
defmes truth for atomic sentences directly without the concept of satisfaction). Truth is
always relative to a structure or model, and such a structure as a relational system (with
objects and relations) and its substructures are (collections of) facts. For example, the
relational system consisting of John and Mary and the relation of loving between them
is the truth-maker for the sentence 'John loves Mary'. The general fact that the class of
human beings is a subclass of the class of mortals is a truth-maker for the generalization
that all human beings are mortal.
Carnap's formulation C for the semantic defmition of truth includes propositions
that are designated by sentences. Alternatively, propositions could be replaced by states
of affairs or facts. This schema (with reference to Russell and Austin, not to Carnap) is
presented as the 'essence' of the correspondence theory of truth by Kirkham (1992, pp.
130-133). Kirkham also states that this sort of schema "captures the essence of Tarski's
idea of truth per se" (ibid., p. 168). He formulates C so that it is not relatived to a
particular language, but notes that the relation of meaning might be understood as
language-relative (recall that Carnap's notion of designation is relative to a semantical
system). Kirkham concludes that Tarski was forced to reject C as a definition, because
it contains semantical notions, so that the theory which he eventually formulated is not
a form of correspondence theory. In my view, it is more appropriate to say that Tarski
employed something like C to give an incomplete correspondence theory: as he left
open the general nature of interpretation I, his account has to be complemented with a
theory of reference and meaning for linguistic terms.
 T ARSKIAN TRUTH AS CORRESPONDENCE 99

Tarski's definition of truth for atomic sentences is a form of the 'strong'

correspondence theory, since truth involves an isomorphic congruence between a
sentence and a fact (cf. Kirkham, 1992). In this respect, Tarski's approach is essentially
the same as in the picture theory of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. If one is liberal and
willing to include in ontology all kinds of complex and composite facts, the schema C
would justify the general claim that Tarski's truth is based on strong correspondence
even for composite sentences. However, it may seem more natural to think that the
truth-maker for the sentence 'Grass is green or moon is cheese' is the fact that grass is
green, not the disjunctive fact that grass is green or moon is cheese. In this case, the
proposition p in schema C does not range over facts as truth-makers, and Tarski's
account of truth for non-atomic sentences is only a 'weak' correspondence or a
correlation between a sentence and a structure.
The game-theoretical definition of truth (Hintikka, 1996) can be understood as an
improvement of this idea: the proposition p expressed by sentence s, or the meaning of
s, should not be replaced in schema C by a single complex fact but rather by a game
G(s), i.e., a tree with moves by Myself (disjunction, existential quantifier) and Nature
(conjunction, universal quantifier), expressing all the different ways in which the
semantic evaluation of s can end up with an atomic statement. If a play in G(s) ends
with a true atomic statement, I win. Then, ifG(s) is the game associated with s,

(G) s is true if and only if! have a winning strategy in game G(s).

7. THE FIFTH OBJECTION

Claim: The application of model theory to the semantics of natural language

presupposes an absolute conception of THE REAL WORLD, "fixed and ready, sharply
delineated in all its aspects and where the answer to every possible question is already
decided" (Sundholm, 1994). The correspondence theory presupposes "metaphysical
realism" or the idea of a "ready-made world" (Putnam, 1983a).
Reply: Model theory can be applied to cases where the structures are human-made
constructions in the Popperian World 3 (e.g., the structure of natural numbers) (see
Niiniluoto, 1992). The correspondence theory of truth can be applied to statements
about cultural objects and artifacts that are genetically mind-involving. A scientific
realist, who accepts the existence of the ontologically mind-independent WORLD,
need not assume that this WORLD has a unique ready-made structure. Indeed, he need
not assume that there is a unique and fixed language which is able to speak about the
whole WORLD. Rather, each well-defmed language L speaks only about a fragment
W(L) of THE WORLD (see Niiniluoto, 1984). In this sense, THE WORLD has as
many structures as there are different conceptual frameworks for describing it.
If L is given a semantically determinate interpretation I, this fragment W(L) is
uniquely determined by L and THE WORLD. Hence, what is true of W(L) is also true
of THE WORLD. This thesis needs two qualifications. First, ifthe interpretation of Lis
semantically indefinite, i.e., L contains vague or fuzzy terms, then it is related to a
family (or even a fuzzy set) W(L) of L-structures, and a sentence in Lis defmed to be
100 ILKKA NIINILUOTO

true (false) ifand only if it is true (false) in each structure in W(L) (cf. Przelecki, 1969;
Niiniluoto, 1987). Secondly, assuming that L contains idealizational concepts defmed
relative to counterfactual assumptions (e.g., mass points without extension, frictionless
planes), then it may be more intresting to study, instead of W(L) itself, what the
structure of THE WORLD would be if these assumptions were the case. But also in this
situation what is true of the idealizational or counterfactual structure W;d(L) may be
truthlike about THE WORLD (cf. Niiniluoto, 1986, 1987).

8. THE SIXTH OBJECTION

Claim: Tarski's approach makes sentences true or false "by defmition", not "because
the things are the way they are" (Johnson, 1992). Tarski fails to note that truth is not a
purely semantic concept, but depends also on reality (Stenius, 1989). If we give the
world its structure via a language, then the coincidence with a true sentence with the
world becomes ''trivial'' (Peregrin, 1995, p. 214).
Reply: For formal languages, we are indeed free to stipulate and specifY their
interpretation - and thereby to decide which sentences turn out to be true. The terms of
natural languages usually already have meanings through conventions adopted in
linguistic communities. The truth of the sentence 'Snow is white' depends on the
contingent material fact of nature that snow is white. But it also depends on the
contingent semantical fact that the English community uses the word 'snow' to refer to
snow (cf. Niiniluoto, 1994). Hence, Tarskian T-sentences are also contingent non-
trivial truths.
Stenius (1989, p. 229) claims that the Tarskians are inclined to think that truth is
simply a relation between a grapheme and its added semantics, not a relation involving
reality as the third factor, but here I think Stenius misconstrues the Tarskian idea of
interpretation. To say that truth is a semantic concept, does not imply that the truth of
an interpreted sentence would be independent on the way the world is. Stenius seems to
have been misled by the fact that Tarski's early papers do not make explicit the world
or structure where a sentence is interpreted (see Section 2).
It is correct to say with Peregrin (1995), p. 206, that the space of possible worlds is
always language-relative. But this does not make model theory suspectible as a theory
of semantics, unless the universal medium conception of language and thereby the
"ineffability of semantics" is assumed (cf. ibid., p. 205). It is important that typically
the interpretation of terms of natural language does not alone fIx their extensions, i.e.,
the function I is not specifIed by us extensionally by specifYing the pairs
<predicate,class>, but rather I gives the meaning of the term and leaves the
determination of the extension to depend on the world9 • In this way, our choice of the
language L and its interpretation I defmes a class of alternative L-structures, but it is up
to THE WORLD to 'decide' which one of them W(L) really obtains. In brief, we
choose the language L, and THE WORLD chooses the structure W(L). For example, we
defme the concept of a dog, and THE WORLD decides whether there actually are
dogs. As truth in W(L) is defmed in the Tarskian way, truth becomes an objective or
non-epistemic matter. This is suffient for critical realism, and does not lead to
 T ARSKIAN TRUTH AS CORRESPONDENCE 101

relativism: what is true about W(L) in L is also true about THE WORLD. Furthermore,
as the structures W(L) are fragments of the same WORLD, they must all be compatible
with each other (unlike the "world versions" of Nelson Goodman, 1978).

9. THE SEVENTH OBJECTION

Claim: The application of concepts is always based on, but undermined by, the finite
number of earlier applications, and the next case has to be decided by us; hence,
concept application is not determined by the external or material reality but rather by
circumstances and social reasons (Barnes, Bloor, and Henry, 1996).
Reply: One may agree with David Bloor that meanings are "institutions", based
upon social conventions and dependent on our use of the terms. But still we should
avoid Bloor's Wittgensteinianfinitism which claims that "we never know what our kind
terms mean ... for we never know how they are going to be used" (ibid., p. 55). Even
though classificatory concepts may be to some extent 'open-ended', usually their
meanings are not completely arbitrary: they should be specified as functions which
predetermine the future application of concepts at least in clear cases. The Tarskian
approach can also be extended to a theory of fuzzy or partial truth which covers cases
of semantic vagueness. This is compatible with Bloor's thesis that the previous
applications of classificatory concepts are always 'revisable': we are always free to
change the meaning of our concepts, and such a meaning change may imply a
corresponding change in truth values. The fmitist argument thus seems to conflate two
different claims: no rule can be specified so that it covers the next case (which is
incorrect), and we are free to decide which rule to apply in the next case (which is
correct).

10. THE EIGTH OBJECTION

Claim: Tarski's account is not adequate or sufficient for scientific languages, since
theories have many different intended applications and their basic concepts are plagued
with referential instability and vagueness (Wojcicki, 1994).
Reply: A theory may be interpreted in different ways in its intended models; for
example, physical objects are treated as mass points in some applications of Newton's
theory, and as extended rigid bodies in other applications. The truth value of Newton's
laws is determined separately for each such application. Relative to some applications
the theory may be true in the strict sense, while in others it may be only truthlike or
approximately true to some degree (Niiniluoto, 1987). The concept of theory and its
applications involves 'pragmatic' considerations, but that does not force us to revise the
Tarskian notion of truth.

University ofHelsinki
102 ILKKA NIINILUOTO

NOTES

I Tarski's classical monograph appeared in Polish in 1933 and in Gennan in 1936. For the English
translation, see Tarski (1956), Ch. VIII. Tarski's programme of "scientific semantics" was publicly presented
in an international conference in Paris in 1935.
2 An alternative way of defining the truth value of a complex sentence is given by the game-theoretical
approach (see Hintikka, 1996). It has turned out to be a flexible and useful tool for analyzing some aspects of
the semantics of natural languages. Hintikka's semantic games employ an objectual interpretation of
quantifiers, where atomic fonnulas are satisfied by objects in a given domain. The truth of atomic sentences
is defined by clauses of the type (I). Therefore, like Tarski's definition, the game-theoretical definition can be
regarded as a fonn of the correspondence theory of truth.
3 It is an important task of model theory to study the set-theoretical and topological structure of the class of
all L-structures. See Bell and Slornson (1969).
4 It should be noted, however, that Tarski did not believe in the possibility of drawing a unique or "sharp"
boundary between logical and extra-logical tenns (Tarski, 1956, pp. 418-419). This was, already from 1929
onwards, an issue between Camap and him. Camap wanted to maintain this dichotomy in order to establish a
division between analytic and synthetic truth. See Camap (1942), p. vii.
5 It is important to note that here the 'sequences' include the interpretations of predicate variables. For
example, let A be the sentence 'All married men are married'. Then, using PI and P2 as predicate variables,
A' would have the fonn (for all x)(if PIX and p]);, then PIX). This open fonnula is satisfies by the sequence
<red, tomato>, which is a model of the original sentence. In fact, sentence A is here a logical truth, and it is
satisfied by all sequences (i.e., pairs) of classes.
6 The one-domain assumption was upheld in many later theories of semantics (cf. Hintikka, 1997, p. 200).
For example, Camap's state descriptions represent alternative possible states of a fixed world of individuals.
Even model theory would fit this kind of approach, if one were willing to include in the accepted ontology all
set-theoretical structures build up from actual physical objects and mathematical entities. The step to a
possible worlds semantics, where structures with a domain of possible individuals are allowed, was made by
Stig Kanger and Jaakko Hintikka in the 1950s, but even in this tradition versions of the one-domain
assumption have played a role in the work ofKripke and Montague (cf. Hintikka, ibid.).
7 Putnam (1983b) claims that the T-equivalence
(*) 'Schnee ist weiss' is true iff snow is white
holds even in those counterfactual cases where 'Schnee ist weiss' means that water is liquid. This argument
ignores again that for Tarski truth is relative to an interpretation function J, and a change of J leads to a new
language (cf. (5) above). Similarly, Stich (1990) fails to note that different reference relations (i.e., different
functions 1) lead to different languages. See Niiniluoto (1994).
8 In his 1935 paper on logical consequence, Tarski says that a 'sequence' is a model of a sentence (see
Section 2). But in this case a sentence which is not logically true will not be satisfied by 'all sequences'. Cf.
note 5.
9 One way of achieving this is to follow Camap (1942), whose designation function links a predicate with a
property. If the predicate 'white' designates the property of whiteness, then it depends on the world what
actual instances it has. In the Camap-Montague-Hintikka tradition, this idea is fonnulated by saying that, at
least in the ideal case, the meaning of a predicate is a function from possible worlds to extensions. A function
can be defined so that all of its values are not known in advance, but only after calculation or inquiry. Hence,
knowing the meaning of a sentence does not yet imply knowing its truth value in the actual world.
 TARSKIAN TRUTH AS CORRESPONDENCE 103

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 DONALD DAVIDSON

THE CENTRALITY OF TRUTH

There is a long tradition according to which the concept of truth is one of the most
important subjects for philosophical discussion, but in this centuIy the tradition has
come to be seriously questioned by a large number of philosophers, as well as
historians, literary critics and theoreticians, and others. I think this is because of various
tempting errors and confusions. Here I examine a few of the reasons truth has become
tarnished, or at least diminished, in the minds of many, and then go on to say why the
concept of truth should be restored to its key role in our understanding of the world and
of the minds of agents.
Before it could come to seem worthwhile to debunk truth, it was necessary to
represent truth as something grander than it is, or to endow it with powers it does not
have. When there was no clear line between philosophy and science, it was natural for
philosophers to claim to be purveyors of the closest thing to truth on offer.
Concentration on epistemology, especially when epistemology seemed called on to
provide ultimate grounds of justification for knowledge, encouraged the confused idea
that philosophy was the place to look for the fmal and most basic truths on which all
other truths, whether of science, morality, or common sense, must rest. Plato's
conflation of abstract universals with entities of supreme value reinforced the confusion
of truth with the most eminent truths; the confusion is apparent in the view (which Plato
ultimately came to question) that the only perfect exemplar of a universal or form is the
form itself Thus only circularity (the universal or concept) is perfectly circular, only
the concept of a hand is a perfect hand, only truth itself is completely true.
Here we have a deep confusion, a category mistake, which was apparently doomed
to flourish. Truth isn't an object, and so it can't be true; truth is a concept, and is
intelligibly attributed to things like sentences, utterances, beliefs and propositions,
entities which have a propositional content. It is an error to think that if someone seeks
to understand the concept of truth, that person is necessarily trying to discover
important general truths about justice or the foundations of physics. The mistake
percolates down to the idea that a theory of truth must somehow tell us what, in general,
is true, or at least how to discover truths.
No wonder there has been a reaction! Philosophy was promising far more than it, or
any other discipline, could deliver. Nietzsche famously reacted; so, in a different way,
did the American pragmatists. Dewey, for example, quite properly rejected the idea that
philosophers were privy to some special or foundational specie of truth without which
science could not hope to advance. But he coupled this virtuous modesty with an
absurd theory about the concept of truth; having derided pretensions to superior access

105
J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), 105-115.
© 1999 D. Davidson.
106 DONALD DAVIDSON

to truths, he felt he must attack the classical concept itself. The attack, in the fashion of
the times, took the form of a persuasive redefmition. Since the word 'Truth' has an aura
of being something valuable, the trick of persuasive definitions is to redefine it to be
something of which you approve, "something to steer by" in Rorty's phrase. So Dewey
declared that a belief or theory is true if and only if it promotes human affairs 1•
It would be otiose to review the obvious objections to this view, for both its
proponents and critics are familiar with them. Proponents glory in the conflicts with
common sense2 , critics swell with the silly pleasure of having spotted irresponsible
rhetoric. It is more interesting to ask why Dewey, and the others Rorty includes in
Dewey's camp, James, Nietzsche, Foucault and himself, put forward a thesis so clearly
contrary to the philosophically interesting concept of truth. I think of four related
reasons.
According to Rorty, Dewey "agreed with Nietzsche that the traditional notion of
Truth, as correspondence to the intrinsic nature of Reality, was a remnant of the idea of
submission to the Will of God". Truth as correspondence with reality may be an idea
we are better off without, especially when, as in this quotation, 'truth' and 'reality' are
capitalized. The formulation is not so much wrong as empty, but it does have the merit
of suggesting that something is not true simply because it is believed, even if believed
by everyone. The trouble lies in the claim that the formula has explanatory power. The
notion of correspondence would be a help if we were able say, in an instructive way,
which fact or slice of reality it is that makes a particular sentence true. No one has
succeeded in doing this. Ifwe ask, for example, what makes the sentence 'The moon is
a quarter of a million miles away' true, the only answer we come up with is that it is the
fact that the moon is a quarter of a million miles away. Worse still, if we try to provide
a serious semantics for reference to facts, we discover that they melt into one; there is
no telling them apart. The proof of this claim is given by Alonzo Church, who credits it
to Frege. Church thinks this is the reason Frege held that all true sentences name the
same thing, which he called The True. Kurt Godel quite independently produced
essentially the same proof, holding that it was awareness of this line of thinking that led
Russell to invent the theory of descriptions (Neale, 1995). Whatever the history of the
relevant argument (which is now often called 'The Slingshot'), we must, I think, accept
the conclusion; there are no interesting and appropriate entities available which, by
being somehow related to sentences, can explain why the true ones are true and the
others not. There is good reason, then, to be skeptical about the importance of the
correspondence theory of truth.
When 'truth' is capitalized, it is perhaps natural to think there is a unique way of
describing things which gets at their essential nature, "an interpretation of the world
which gets it right", as Rorty puts it, a description of "Reality As It Is In Itself'. Of
course there is no such unique 'interpretation' or description, not even in the one or
more languages each of us commands, not in any possible language. Or perhaps we
should just say this is an ideal of which no one has made good sense. It hardly matters,
for no sensible defender of the objectivity of attributions of truth to particular utterances
or beliefs is stuck with this idea, and so there is no reason why, if we abstain from the
search for The Perfect Description of Reality, we have to buy the thesis that there is no
 THE CENTRALITY OF TRUTH 107

distinction, "even in principle", between beliefs which are true and beliefs which are
"merely good to steer by" (Rorty 1996, p. 7).
We come here to a far more powerful consideration in favor of a somewhat tamer,
but clearly recognizable, version of the pragmatic theory of truth. Rorty brings it to the
fore when he credits Dewey with the thought that the correspondence theory adds
nothing to "ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling... the true from the false." What
is clearly right is a point made long ago by Plato in the Theaetetus: truths do not come
with a 'mark', like the date in the comer of some photographs, which distinguishes
them from falsehoods. The best we can do is test, experiment, compare, and keep an
open mind. But no matter how long and well we and coming generations keep at it, we
and they will be left with fallible beliefs. We know many things, and willieam more;
what we will never know for certain is which of the things we believe are true. Since it
is not recognizable when achieved, there is no point in making truth a goal. Truth is not
a value, the 'pursuit of truth' is empty unless it means only that it is often worthwhile to
increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our
calculations.
From the fact that we will never be able to tell which of our beliefs are objectively
true, pragmatists conclude that we may as well identify our best researched, most
successful, beliefs with the true ones, and give up the idea of objectivity. (Truth is
objective if the truth of a belief or sentence is independent of whether it is justified by
all our evidence, believed by our neighbors, or is good to steer by.) But here we have a
choice. Instead of giving up the traditional view that truth is objective, we can give up
the equally traditional view (to which the pragmatists adhere) that truth is a norm,
something for which to strive. I agree with the pragmatists that we can't consistently
take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think they would
have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective, but pointless as a
goae.
Some contemporary pragmatists, unlike Rorty, have moved away from the hopeless
idea that a belief is true if it helps us get on with life, or the less foolish, but still wrong,
view that truth is no different from what is, perhaps at its practical best, epistemically
available. But other philosophers who would not call themselves pragmatists are still
rocking in the wake of the legitimate reaction against inflated or misguided theories of
truth. The tendency they have joined is a broad one, one which is perhaps now the
mainstream of philosophical thought about the concept of truth. The banner under
which these debunkers march is dejlationism. The idea common to the various brands
of deflationism is that truth, though a legitimate concept, is essentially trivial, and
certainly not worth the grand metaphysical attention it has received. This view receives
its strength from two sources. One is wide, and largely justified, dissatisfaction with the
standard attempts to defme or otherwise explicate, the concept. Probably the most
familiar definition, and the most immediately attractive, declares that an utterance or
belief is true if and only if it corresponds to the facts, or reality, or the way things are. I
have already said why I think correspondence theories are without explanatory content.
Coherence defmitions or 'theories' have their attractions, but only as epistemic
theories, not as accounting for truth. For while it is clear that only a consistent set of
108 DONALD DAVIDSON

beliefs could contain all true beliefs, there is no reason to suppose every consistent set
of beliefs contains only truths. Openly epistemic theories have their powerful
supporters: I think particularly of Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam, both of whom,
with modifications, hold that truth is warranted assertability. I respect this idea for the
same reason I respect closely related pragmatic theories, because it relates truth to
human attitudes like belief, intention and desire, and I believe any complete account of
truth must do this. But theirs cannot be the right way to express the relation. For either
the conditions of warranted assertability are made so strong that they include truth
itself, in which case the account is circular, or circularity is avoided by making the
conditions explicit, and it then becomes clear that a fully warranted assertion may be
false.
What, then, is wrong with deflationism? Why shouldn't we accept the view that
truth is as shallow as the correspondence theory seems to show it to be? Deflationism
has taken a number of forms in recent years. Frank Ramsey, so prescient in many areas,
was one of the first to try to make out that, as he says, ["T]here is really no separate
problem of truth but merely a linguistic muddle" (Ramsey, 1990, p. 38). His argument
begins by noting that 'It is true that Caesar was murdered' means no more than 'Caesar
was murdered': in such contexts, 'It is true that' simply operates like double negation, a
sentential connective that maps true sentences onto true and false onto false; aside from
emphasis and verbosity, the phrase adds nothing to what we can say. Ramsey makes the
same point about phrases like 'It is a fact that'. More perspicuous than others, though,
Ramsey notices that we cannot eliminate the truth predicate in this way in sentences
like 'He is always right', that is, 'Whatever he says is true'. Here the truth predicate
seems indispensable. Ramsey makes a confused (and unworkable) proposal for the
elimination of the truth predicate in such cases; we have to conclude that he did not
prove his case that the problem of truth is merely a linguistic muddle. (Confusions of
use and mention make it impossible to be sure what Ramsey had in mind, but one
suspects that ifhe had pursued the subject he would have come out pretty much where
Tarski did.)
Ramsey's deflationist attempt, unlike most such attempts, hinged on taking the
primary bearers of truth to be propositions. Recently, however, Paul Horwich has
revived what we may call propositional deflationism (Horwich, 1990). Horwich's thesis
is not that the concept of truth is eliminable, but that it is trivial. He points out that a
sentence like 'The proposition that Caesar was murdered is true if and only if Caesar
was murdered' is surely true, and that such sentences specify precisely the
circumstances under which any expressible proposition is true. He then claims that the
totality of such sentences provides an infmite axiomatization of the concept of truth (he
excludes by fiat sentences that lead to contradiction). Horwich allows that this does not
provide an explicit defmition of the concept of truth, but it does, he maintains, exhaust
the content of that concept. In particular, there is no need to employ the concept in
order to explain the concepts of meaning and belief, since these can be explicated in
other ways. As will presently be clear, I do not accept these last claims. But it does not
matter, since I think we do not understand Horwich's axiom schema or the particular
axioms that instance it. The problem concerns the semantic analysis of sentences like
 THE CENTRALITY OF TRUTH 109

'The proposition that Caesar was murdered is true if and only if Caesar was murdered.'
The predicate 'is true' requires a singular term as subject; the subject is therefore 'the
proposition that Caesar was murdered'. Presumably it names or refers to a proposition.
But then, what is the role ofthe sentence 'Caesar was murdered' in this singular term or
description? The only plausible answer is that the words 'the proposition that' are a
functional expression that maps whatever the following sentence names onto a
proposition. In that case, the sentence itself must be a referring term. If we are
Fregeans, we will say it names a truth value. On this hypothesis, the axiom is a
straightforward tautology, and explains nothing (since the words 'the proposition that'
simply map a truth value onto itself)4. The alternative is that in its fIrst occurrence, the
sentence names some more interesting entity. But then we do not understand the axiom,
since the sentence 'Caesar was murdered' is used once as a name of some interesting
entity, and once as an ordinary sentence, and we have no idea how to accommodate this
ambiguity in a serious semantics.
Horwich claims both Quine and Tarski as fellow deflationists. But are they? Quine
can apparently be quoted in support of the claim. He has repeatedly spoken of what he
calls the disquotational aspect of truth, applied, of course, to sentences, not
propositions. The truth predicate, applied to sentences, is disquotational in this sense: a
sentence like "'Snow is white' is true" is always equivalent to the result of disquoting
the contained sentence and removing the truth predicate; equivalent, then, in this case,
to 'Snow is white'. Here we see clearly how we can eliminate the truth predicate under
favorable circumstances. Quine knows, of course, that there are contexts in which this
maneuver will not remove the truth predicate. Nevertheless, the totality of sentences
like '" Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white" exhaust the extension of the
truth predicate for a particular language, as Tarski emphasized, and each such sentence
does tell us exactly under what conditions the quoted sentence is true.
Disquotation cannot, however, pretend to give a complete account of the concept of
truth, since it works only in the special case where the metalanguage contains the object
language. But neither object language nor metalanguage can contain its own truth
predicate. In other words, the very concept we want to explain is explicitly excluded
from expression in any consistent language for which disquotation works. To put this
another way: if we want to know under what conditions a sentence containing a truth
predicate is true, we cannot use that predicate in the disquotational mode. Disquotation
does not give the entire content of the concept of truth.
At best, then, disquotation gives the extension of a truth predicate for a single
language; if we ask what all such predicates have in common, disquotation cannot
answer. Something analogous must be said about Tarski's truth defInitions. Tarski
showed how to give explicit defmitions of truth for languages satisfying certain
conditions, but at the same time he proved (given some natural assumptions) that no
general defInition was possible; the general concept escaped him. He did go far beyond
anything implicit in disquotation, however, for he was able to give proper defmitions of
truth - relative to specifIc languages, it goes without saying, which disquotation cannot
do. Tarski's truth defInitions are not trivial, and they reveal something deep about
languages of any serious expressive power. As long as a language has the equivalent of
110 DONALD DAVIDSON

a fIrst order quantifIcational structure and no decision method, there is no way to defme
truth for it except by introducing a sophisticated version of reference, what Tarski
called satisfaction. Tarski' s satisfIers are infmite sequences which pair the variables of a
language with the entities in its ontology. The interesting work of the concept of
satisfaction comes in characterizing the semantic properties of open sentences, but in
turns out in the end that a closed sentence is true if and only if it is satisfIed by some
sequence. This may suggest that we hl'lve here the makings of a correspondence theory,
but it would be a Fregean theory, since every sequence satisfIes every true sentence.
You could say that though this was not his intention, Tarski here indirectly vindicates
Frege's slingshot argument.
We must conclude that Tarski's work gives no comfort to those who would like to
revive the correspondence theory, nor does it support a deflationary attitude. Given
how unsatisfactory the alternatives seem to be, should we nevertheless rest content with
the genuine insight Tarski has given us into the nature of truth? I think not, for we have
to wonder how we know that it is some single concept which Tarski indicates how to
defme for each of a number of well-behaved languages. Tarski does not, of course,
attempt to defme such a concept, though the title of his famous essay is 'The Concept of
Truth in Formalized Languages' ('Der Wahrheitsbegriff. ..') (Tarski 1956). Various
remarks in this work and elsewhere also make clear that Tarski assumes there is one
concept, even if it can't be defIned. This comes out not only in his stated conviction
that his work is directly relevant to the 'classical' concept of truth with which
philosophers have always been concerned, but also in his criterion for success in the
project of defIning truth for particular languages. This (informal) criterion requires that
the defmition entail as theorems all sentences of the form

sis true-in-L iff p

where s is a description of any sentence of L and p is a translation of that sentence into

the language of the defmed predicate 'true-in-L '. Clearly, we cannot recognize that such
a predicate is a truth predicate unless we already grasp the (undefmed) general concept
of truth. It is also signifIcant that Tarski connects the concept of truth with translation:
this is essential, since the language for which truth is being defmed cannot be the
language which contains the defmed truth predicate.
This brings me to my positive theme: if all the defmitions of the general concept
fail, and none of the short paraphrases seem to come close to capturing what is
important or interesting about the concept, why do some of us persist in thinking it is
interesting and important? One of the reasons is its connection with meaning. This is
the connection of which Tarski makes use, for translation succeeds only if it preserves
truth, and the traditional aim of translation is to preserve meaning. But to what extent
does meaning depend on truth?
Almost everyone agrees that some sentences, at least, have the value true or false,
and that for such sentences, we may speak of truth conditions. But deflationists and
others tend to doubt whether this fact has much to do with what sentences mean.
Meaning, it is frequently said, has to do rather with the condition under which it is
 THE CENTRALITY OF TRUTH 111

justified or proper to use a sentence to make an assertion; in general, meaning has to do

with how sentences are used rather than with their truth conditions. Here I sense two
confusions. The first is that truth-conditional and use accounts of meaning are somehow
in competition. One can legitimately dispute the claim that a Tarski-type truth defmition
can serve as a theory of meaning. I think it can, when properly understood, but that is
not my thesis here. What is clear, I think, is that someone who knows under what
conditions a sentence would be true understands that sentence, and if the sentence has a
truth value (true, false or perhaps neither), then someone who does not know under
what conditions it would be true doesn't understand it. This simple claim doesn't rule
out an account of meaning which holds that sentences mean what they do because of
how they are used; it may be that they are used as they are because of their truth
conditions, and they have the truth conditions they do because of how they are used.
Let us look, then, at the idea that use determines meaning. Something has a use if it
satisfies, or would satisfy, a value or realizes, or would realize, an intention. The
intentions with which we speak thus point to the uses to which we are putting language.
But think how many intentions are involved in a single utterance! We intentionally
move our mouths and tongues. We do this with the intention of making certain sounds.
We do this almost always with the intention of uttering sounds which will be interpreted
in a certain way by our audience. We do this with the intention of making an utterance
with a certain force - the force of assertion, or interrogation or command, and so on.
We do this with the intention of giving information, or of deceiving someone, or
confusing them, or receiving information; here the list of possibilities becomes literally
infinite. And even this is seldom the end. We want to know the way to town, which is
why we asked, and we want to know that because we want to purchase a pig, which ....
and so on. For every one of these intentions we can also use the word 'mean'. We mean
to make those sounds, we mean to ask a question, we mean to buy a pig. Which of these
'uses' is supposed to yield the meanings of words and sentences? The plausible answer
is, the intention of uttering sounds that will be interpreted in a certain way. Interpreted
how? Interpreted as having the meaning we have in mind, of course. We learn in our
verbal intercourse with others how expressions will probably be interpreted, and we
make use of them on the reasonable assumption that we have this right. But this use is
no help in explaining meaning, for this is a use that depends on the fact that we believe
these words have an appropriate meaning.
From Wittgenstein we know the story about the builder and his helper: 'Block!',
'Slab!' (Wittgenstein 1953). This is to illustrate the connection between use (getting the
helper to bring a block, a slab) and meaning ('Bring a block', 'Bring a slab'). As an
encouragement to look to such uses as a clue to meaning, this is fme. It is salutary to be
reminded that words don't mean anything except as they perform in human affairs; it is
those affairs that somehow endow words with what meaning they have. But no theory
of meaning follows from this important and often neglected fact. For the one-word
sentences in Wittgenstein's example (short, we assume, for 'Bring a block, a slab')
could be used for an infmite number of purposes besides getting a helper to bring such
objects; the same utterances could be used to amuse the helper (no more slabs or blocks
are available), to annoy her, to illustrate a point (Wittgenstein's actual use in the
112 DONALD DAVIDSON

Philosophical Investigations). Language would not be the useful device it is if each

sentence could be used for exactly one purpose. It is no help to try to conjure meanings
out of 'standard' uses; there are no such. Nor can we appeal to the idea there is a
'convention' that we are to use such a sentence as 'Caesar was murdered' to inform
people of the cause of Caesar's death; there is no such convention. If there were a
convention to his effect, it would be a misuse of language to use it in any other way - a
contravention of a convention. But our words hold their meaning through a vast variety
of uses. That is their virtue.
It is empty to say meaning is use unless we specify what use we have in mind, and
when we do specify, in a way that help with meaning, we find ourselves going in a
circle. Nevertheless, it is only by registering how a language is used that we can make it
our own. How do we do it? Before we have an idea of truth or error, before the advent
of concepts or propositional thought, there is a rudiment of communication in the
simple discovery that sounds produce results. Crying is the frrst step toward language
when crying is found to procure one or another form of relief or satisfaction. More
specific sounds, imitated or not, are rapidly associated with more specific pleasures.
Here use would be meaning, if anything like intention and meaning were in the picture.
A large further step has been taken when the child notices that others also make
distinctive sounds at the same time the child is having the experiences that provoke its
own volunteered sounds. For the adult, these sounds have a meaning, perhaps as one
word sentences. The adult sees herself as doing a little ostensive teaching: 'Eat', 'Red',
'Ball', 'Mamma', 'Milk', 'No'. There is now room for what the adult views as error:
the child says 'Block' when it is a slab. This move fails to be rewarded, and the
conditioning becomes more complex. This is still pretty simple stuff, for nothing more
is necessarily involved than verbal responses increasingly conditioned to what the
teacher thinks of as appropriate circumstances, and the child fmds satisfying, often
enough. There is little point in trying to spot, in this process, the moment at which the
child is talking and thinking. The interaction between adult and child in the ostensive
learning situation I have described provides the necessary conditions for the emergence
of language and propositional thought, by creating a space in which there can be
success and failure. What is clear is that we can only say the child thinks something is
red, or a ball, if it appreciates the distinction for itself; the child thinks something is red
or a ball only if it is in some sense aware that a mistake is possible. It is classifying
things, and it may have put something in the wrong slot.
It is difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of the step from native or learned
disposition to respond to stimuli of a certain sort, to employing a concept with the
awareness of the chance of error. It is the step from reacting to proximal stimuli to the
thought of distal objects and events, the step from mere conditioned response to what
Wittgenstein called 'following a rule'. This is where the concept of truth enters, for
there is no sense in saying a disposition is in error - one cannot fail to 'follow' a
disposition, but one can fail to follow a rule.
Here we must ask: how can we reconcile the fact that a general appeal to how
language is used cannot be parlayed into a theory of meaning with the present claim
that ostensive learning is the entering wedge into language, for surely the ostending
 THE CENTRALITY OF TRUTH 113

teacher is making a use of one-word sentences that the learner picks up? The answer
lies in the transition just mentioned. At the start the learner does not register anything
more than an association between object or situation and sound or gesture. The value of
the association is supplied by the teacher or the environment in the form of reward. In
the beginning there is not a word but a sound being given a use. The teacher sees the
learner as picking up a bit of language with a meaning already there; the learner has no
idea of prior meaning or use: for the learner, what was meaningless before now takes on
significance. In the early stage of ostensive learning, error has no point for the learner,
for there is nothing for him to be wrong about, and where error has no point, there is
not a concept or thought. Once trial and error (from the teacher's point of view) is
replaced with thought and belief, the concept of truth has application.
During the learning process, the pragmatist's claim that there is nothing to be
gained by distinguishing between success (as measured by the teacher's approval or
getting what one wants) and truth is clearly right. This is a distinction that depends on
further developments. These are not hard to imagine in rough outline. Ostensive
learning works first and best with whole sentences, in practice often represented by
what for the experienced speaker are single names, common nouns, verbs, adjectives,
and adverbs ('Mama', 'Man', 'Come', 'Good', 'Careful'). The child who has no more
is still a pragmatist. Once some grammar is in hand, however, separately learned parts
can be assembled in new ways, and truth separates from the merely useful or approved.
The references of names, the extensions of predicates, the combinatorial devices
themselves, are in the hands of teachers and society; truth is not.
Sentences mean what they do because of the semantic properties of the words and
combinatorial devices they contain. You would not understand a sentence if you did not
know that the names and other singular terms in it purported to refer, or if you were
unaware of the extension of its predicates. But to know this is to know that the materials
are present which make for truth and falsity. This is so even when we know that a term
fails of reference or a predicate has an empty extension. Our understanding of truth
conditions is central to our understanding of every sentence. This may escape our
notice for many reasons. The first, and most general, reason is that in the normal course
of conversation we do not care whether or not a sentence is true; it is a fairly rare
occasion when we make an assertion by saying what we literally believe to be true. Our
ordinary talk is studded with metaphor, ellipsis, easily recognized irony, and hyperbole,
not to mention slips of the tongue, jokes, and malapropisms. But we understand a
metaphor only because we know the usual meanings of the words, and know under
what conditions the sentence containing the metaphor would be true. There are cases
where we may decide a metaphorical sentence is neither true nor false, for example
'The sound of the trumpet is scarlet'. Our decision that this sentence has no truth value
(if that is our decision, for we may choose, with Frege, to count it false) is based on our
understanding of the sorts of things of which the predicate 'scarlet' is true or false, and
our decision that the sound of a trumpet is not one of them. Interrogatives may not
themselves be true or false, but they have answers that are. Indeed, it is clear that one
does not understand a yes-no interrogative if one does not know there are two possible
answers, one of which is true and one of which is false. Imperatives, if taken to express
114 DONALD DAVIDSON

an order or command, are understood only if one knows what would be true if they
were obeyed. Sentences with non-referring names ('Pegasus is a winged horse') mayor
may not, according one's semantic theory, have a truth value, but one comprehends
such sentences only if one knows what it would be for the name 'Pegasus' to name a
horse with wings.
Sentences are understood on condition that one has the concept of objective truth.
This goes also for the various propositional attitudes sentences are used to express. It is
possible to have a belief only if one knows that beliefs may be true or false. I can
believe it is now raining, but this is because I know that whether or not it is raining does
not depend on whether I believe it, or everyone believes it, or it is useful to believe it; it
is up to nature, not to me or my society or the entire history of the human race. What is
up to us is what we mean by our words, but that is a different matter. Truth enters into
the other attitudes in other ways. We desire that a certain state of affairs be true, we
fear, hope or doubt that things are one way or another. We intend by our actions to
make it true that we have a good sleep. We are proud or depressed that it is the case
that we have won the second prize. Since all these, and many more attitudes have a
propositional content - the sort of content that can be expressed by a sentence - to have
any of these attitudes is necessarily to know what it would be for the corresponding
sentence to be true. Without a grasp of the concept of truth, not only language, but
thought itself, is impossible.
Truth is important, then, not because it is especially valuable or useful, though of
course it may be on occasion, but because without the idea of truth we would not be
thinking creatures, nor would we understand what it is for someone else to be a thinking
creature. It is one thing to try to define the concept of truth, or capture its essence in a
pithy swnmary phrase; it is another to trace its connections with other concepts. If we
think of the various attempted characterizations as attempting no more than the latter,
their merits become evident. Correspondence, while it is empty as a defInition, does
capture the thought that truth depends on how the world is, and this should be enough
to discredit most epistemic and pragmatic theories. Epistemic and pragmatic theories,
on the other hand, have the merit of relating the concept of truth to human concerns,
like language, belief, thought and intentional action, and it is these connections which
make truth the key to how mind apprehends the world.

University o/California at Berkeley

NOTES
I Much of what I say here about pragmatists early and contemporary is inspired by Rorty's review
(Rorty, 1996) of Alan Ryan (Ryan 1996). Rorty writes:
To take the traditional notion of Truth seriously, you have to do more than agree that some
beliefs are true and some false ... You must agree with Clought that 'It fortifies my soul to
knowtrhat, though I perish, Truth is so'. You must feel uneasy at William James's claim that
'ideas ... become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other
parts of our experience'. You must become indignant when Ryan (accurately paraphrasing
 THE CENTRALITY OF TRUTH 115

Dewey) says that 'to call a statement "true" is no more than to say that it is good to steer our
practice by'.
Ryan doesn't buy the idea that what is useful is necessarily true, but this "puts my [Rorty's]
pragmatist back up. As I said ... the whole point of pragmatism is to stop distinguishing between the
usefulness of a way of talking and its truth".
2 Thus Rorty, in final praise of the pragmatic attitude to truth, says that "non-competitive, though
perhaps irreconcilable, beliefs [may] reasonably [be] called 'true'" (Rorty, 1996, p. 8). Of course one can
imagine circumstances under which it might be reasonable to say this (for example to prevent a fist-
fight), but could it be reasonable, or even possible, to think irreconcilable beliefs are true?
3 Curiously, Rorty sensibly argues that truth is not a norm and that there is no difference in principle
between what is true and what is justified. "Pragmatists think that if something makes no difference to
practice, it should make no difference to philosophy. This conviction makes them suspicious of the
philosopher's emphasis on the difference between justification and truth" (Rorty 1995, p. 281). If there is
no difference, truth is identical with what is justified; but Rorty claims there is lots to say about
justification, yet little to say about truth. If, as seems right, it is a legitimate norm to want to be justified,
but not to seek the truth, then there must be a large difference between them.
4 lowe this suggestion to Burt Dreben.

REFERENCES
Horwich, Paul: 1990,Truth, Oxford, Blackwell.
Neale, Stephen: 1995, 'The Philosophical Significance of Godel's Slingshot', Mind 104,761-825.
Ramsey, Frank Plumpton: 1990, 'Facts and Propositions', in D.H. Mellor (ed.): Philosophical Papers,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard: 1995, 'Is Truth a Goal ofInquiry? Davidson vs. Wright', Philosophical Quarterly 45 (180),
281-300.
Rorty, Richard: 1996, 'Something to Steer by', London Review of Books (June 20), 7,8.
Ryan, Alan: 1996, John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, Norton.
Tarski, Alfred: 1956, 'The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages', in J.H. Woodger (ed.): Logic,
Semantics, Metamathematics, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig: 1953, Philosophical Investigations, New York, Macmillan.
 JEFFMALPAS

MAPPING THE STRUCTURE OF TRUTH:

DAVIDSON CONTRA RORTY

It is folly, Davidson tells us, to attempt to define truth (Davidson 1996). Truth,
according to Davidson, cannot be explicated by reference to notions of coherence,
correspondence or assertability, nor is the Tarskian account of truth adequate to tell
us anything about truth as such (Davidson 1991a)l. What is required is instead an
understanding of the role truth plays in relation to meaning and to the propositional
attitudes and behaviour - truth is to be understood through its relation to the notions
of belief and desire and through the essential role it plays in the understanding of
language and action. On the account offered by Richard Rorty, however, there is no
role for truth here that is over and above the role played by justification. So, in a
recent article, Rorty writes that "[t]he need to justify our beliefs and desires to
ourselves and to our fellow-agents subjects us to norms, and obedience to these
norms produces a behavioural pattern which we must detect in others before
confidently attributing any beliefs to them. But there seems no occasion to look for
obedience to an additional norm, the commandment to seek the truth. For ...
obedience to that commandment will produce no behaviour not produced by the
need to offer justification" (Rorty, 1995: p.287).
The assimilation of truth to justification is not peculiar to Rorty. Indeed, a
disinclination to theorise about truth has often, in recent times, gone hand-in-hand
with a tendency to view 'true' as virtually indistinguishable from 'justified or even
'held true'. We are all familiar with this tendency within many areas of the
humanities and social sciences - although it often arises in more extreme and less
sophisticated forms than are to be found in Rorty's work,2 Yet if we take seriously
the Davidsonian point, also urged on us by Rorty, that any attempt to defme truth
must fail - since truth can never be defined in terms that do not already call upon the
notion itself - then it may seem questionable whether such a tendency can be
resisted. Perhaps the impossibility of defming truth is merely symptomatic of the
lack of any content or significance that attaches to truth as such. One sometimes gets
the impression that this is indeed Rorty's view (See Rorty, 1989: p.8).
In this latter respect, however, Rorty's position is defmitely not Davidson's. The
Davidsonian insistence on the impossibility of successfully arriving at a definition of

117
J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), 117-127.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
118 JEFFMALPAS

truth is neither derived from nor is it taken to imply any diminution in the
significance of truth. In fact, it is precisely the centrality of truth to our thinking
about language and the mind that can be seen as one reason for insisting on the non-
defmability of truth. Still, Rorty, for one, fmds this feature of the Davidsonian
position puzzling (Rorty, 1995: pp.281-287). Why should truth be regarded as
distinct from justification in this way and what role might truth play that cannot be
played by justification? Answering such questions is in large part a matter of
reiterating points made by Davidson himself, but it must also involve some
additional clarification of the issues at stake. Indeed, these issues do not concern the
concept of truth alone, but the concept of the philosophical project as such and the
manner in which that project is to be approached.

It is with a question of philosophical methodology that I wish to begin. In discussing

truth Davidson has said on more than one occasion that it is foolish to expect a
defmition of any important concept - as he points out even Plato had trouble finding
a defmition for anything other than mud (see Davidson, 1990: p.134; Davidson,
1996: pp.263-264) - and truth should be no exception in this regard. I take this
Davidsonian suspicion of the search for definitions - which seems to be primarily
directed at reductive or analytic defmitions that would reduce a concept down to its
elementary components - to be evident, not only in Davidson's discussions of the
concept of truth, but also in the manner in which he approaches many other concepts.
His discussion of the concept of belief in 'Thought and Talk' provides an interesting
and important illustration of this. "We have the idea of belief' writes Davidson "only
from the role of belief in the interpretation of language" (Davidson 1984b: p.170)
and a little earlier in the same paper he comments that "The concept of belief '"
stands ready to take up the slack between objective truth and the held true, and we
come to understand it just in this connection" (Davidson, 1984b: p.170).
Davidson's suspicion of definition is not, of course, without precedent in
twentieth-century philosophy. Another philosopher who also finds the idea of
definition, as a primary aim of philosophical activity, problematic, is the later
Wittgenstein. One of the hallmarks of Wittgenstein's approach in the Investigations
and elsewhere is an attempt to account for concepts by showing how they fit within
networks of other concepts, and networks of practices, rather than by attempting to
reduce those concepts to more 'primitive' notions or to construct defmitions that
capture the definitional essences at stake. The Wittgensteinian motto: "Don't look
for the meaning, look for the use" can therefore be taken as advice that applies to any
philosophical inquiry, not merely the inquiry into meaning - "Don't think, but
look! ... " urges Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein, 1976: p.66). This idea of philosophical
activity as a matter of 'looking', of 'seeing things aright', is clearly connected with
the later Wittgenstein's use of metaphors of travel and topography. As he says of his
manner of approaching the foundations of mathematics: "I am trying to conduct you
on tours in a certain country. I will try to show that the philosophical difficulties
 MAPPING THE STRUCTURE OF TRUTH 119

which arise in mathematics as elsewhere arise because we fmd ourselves in a strange

town and do not know our way about. So we must learn the topography by going
from one place in the town to another, and from there to another, and so on"
(Wittgenstein, 1976: p.44). I take this description to fit, not merely the manner in
which Wittgenstein's discussions progress, but also the way in which the ideas and
concepts at stake are to be understood.
Davidson too can be seen as offering a 'topographical' view of the terrain he
surveys rather than any 'defmitional' account. Consequently, within much of
Davidson's work, concepts are explored and articulated through the manner in which
they implicate, and are implicated by, other concepts within a larger conceptual
framework - much as one maps a landscape through repeated observations and
measurements from one point to another - rather than by examining particular
concepts singly or independently of one another. This 'Davidsonian' strategy
(although, as we have seen, it need not be regarded as peculiar to Davidson) seems
particularly appropriate when it comes to the inquiry into truth, since truth is a
concept that is inextricably linked with a number of other crucial concepts (which is
one reason why deflationary approaches to truth seem so unsatisfactory) and that
appears impossible to reduce to any simple property or relation. Looking to the 'use'
to which the concept of truth is put, or at the 'role' it plays, seems likely, then, to be
a much more fruitful way of proceeding than looking for the 'meaning' of the
concept. Echoing Dummett, whom Davidson quotes approvingly on this matter, we
may say that what we need is to understand the point of the concept of truth (see
Dummett, 1978: pp.xx-xxil
Ifwe do indeed take the Davidsonian approach to be one that looks to the 'point',
the 'use' or the 'role' of the notion of truth, then it does so by paying very close
attention to the role played by truth in our understanding of other persons and of
ourselves. I am not merely adverting here to the role of truth-conditions in
Davidsonian semantics. Indeed, one might claim that the importance of a truth-
conditional account is really only a reflection of the more fundamental role played by
truth in relation to meaning, belief, desire and action and it is this latter role that is
the focus for Davidson's inquiries.
In interpreting another speaker, that is, in identifying the attitudes that the
speaker holds and the actions he or she performs, one looks to the actual
circumstances in which the speaker is located as the basis for such interpretation.
And what this means is that, in the first instance, one looks to the objects and events
to which the speaker is causally related as the guide to the content of the speaker's
attitudes and the identity of the speaker's actions. This mode of proceeding is given
expression in the principle of charity or, as Davidson has also referred to it, the
principle of 'rational accommodation' - a principle that, while it admits of a number
of different formulations, can be expressed in terms of the injunction that one should
look to assign meanings to a speaker's utterances on the basis of the assumption that
the beliefs that those utterances express are for the most part, or at least in the
simplest and most basic cases, true4 •
120 JEFFMALPAS

In this latter respect charity might itself be taken to give expression to the
centrality of truth in interpretation. Yet the principle can, of course, be formulated in
a way that makes no direct reference to truth at all and Davidson has himself
presented it as much in terms of the assumption of agreement as of veridicality of
belief. Can we not, then, simply replace talk of truth by some alternative notion? Can
we not just as easily say 'assume that most of the speaker's beliefs are in agreement
with our own or are justified by our lights' and thereby leave truth out of the matter
altogether? This is indeed Rorty's suggestion. Of the Davidsonian principle of
charity he writes that it "seems to oblige us only to regard most of what the natives
say as justified - to regard them as holding mostly beliefs which we regard as true"
(Rorty, 1995: p.286). And from this Rorty concludes that it is justification and not
truth that is the central concept here.
Yet the notion of justification seems not to provide a way of moving away from
truth, so much as a route that returns us to it. This becomes clear when we ask after
the nature of justificatory practice and its importance. Justification is perhaps most
succinctly characterised as a practice that consists in the citing of evidence that
provides a reason or 'warrant' for assertion or belief. Such a formulation need not, of
course, make any use of the words 'true' or 'truth,' and so it may seem that
justification is a notion that can be understood independently of the notions to which
those words refer. But just as we can probe the concept of justification, we can also
probe the concepts of assertion and belief that are used in its explication. Here
connections with the concept of truth come to light through consideration of the fact
that assertion involves a claim to truth, while belief is a matter of holding true.
Indeed, justification is a practice that is only comprehensible, only justified,
inasmuch as it is tied to the need to arrive at beliefs and assertions that are not
merely 'held true', but that are true. Justification is a practice directed primarily at
'fixing belief in a way that gives us reason to think the beliefs in question are true
and that thereby gives us reason to believe, that is, to hold certain sentences trues.
Justification and belief get their point from the concept of truth; similarly, truth,
one might say, gets its point from the point it gives to these other concepts. This does
not imply that one cannot, for instance, put the principle of charity in terms that
enjoin us to interpret others in ways that optimise agreement in what is held to be
true or justified. But the explanation of why this formulation of charity is acceptable
itself relies on the prior connection of justification and belief with truth.
It is Rorty's claim that the normativity that governs our attributions of belief and
desire requires no more than obedience to the demand for justification and he adds
that ''there seems no occasion to look for obedience to an additional norm, the
commandment to seek the truth. For ... obedience to that command will produce no
behaviour not produced by the need to produce justification" (Rorty 1995: p.287).
This seems, however, to miss the crucial point at issue here. The need to produce
justification is not self-justifying, but is itself dependent on the idea of truth. Without
the latter there would be no behaviour requiring intentional explanation at all.
Consequently, while one may wish to avoid talk of a norm that consists in the
"commandment to seek the truth", it is nevertheless the case that all of those
 MAPPING THE STRUCTURE OF TRUTH 121

linguistic and doxastic practices (practices of asserting, denying, justifying,

questioning, explaining and so forth) that call upon concepts such as belief, desire
and meaning, are organised around the central concept of truth.
The practice of justification does not explain or illuminate the nature of belief.
The concept of truth, however, even if it may be a little odd to talk of its having an
"normative" or explanatory role here6, does provide the background against which
both belief and justification make sense. To believe something is to hold it true, but
such belief also requires justification, that is, it requires that there be some reason for
thinking that what is held true is true. Yet since it is indeed belief that requires such
grounding, and belief is always, in any particular instance, fallible, so justification
can perform its role of only insofar as justification is distinct from and cannot
guarantee truth. Not only is it mistaken to suppose that truth can be effectively
replaced by the notion of justification, but it is mistaken, for the same reason, to
suppose that any practice of justification can be arrived at that would guarantee truth.
Justification provides, not a reason for something being true, but only a reason for
thinking it to be so. It is only thus that the practice of justification connects with the
idea of truth.
This role played by truth in relation to belief is made even clearer when we
reflect further on the operation of charity. The Davidsonian appeal to charity arises
because of the impossibility of gaining access to the meanings of a speaker's
utterances independently of the speaker's beliefs. Charity provides a way of
providing an initial specification of belief (and other attitudes) so as to be able to
arrive at a preliminary theory of meaning. And the role of charity does not end there,
for it remains a constraint on any acceptable theory of meaning and of belief that
they should jointly yield an account ofa speaker's behaviour and attitudes that is, for
the most part, 'internally' consistent and consistent also with the 'external'
environment of the speaker in which the interpreter is situated. Charity thus stands as
an expression of an indispensable presupposition of understanding, namely, that the
overall pattern of behaviour exhibited by speaker and interpreter has to be more or
less the same and that speaker and interpreter must in general stand in a similar
pattern of relations to the environment. Now this presupposition is only partially
captured in the idea of commonality of belief or patterns of justification. It is not
wholly captured in these terms, just in so far as this remains a purely epistemological
characterisation of the presupposition. But the presupposition is not itself wholly an
epistemological one - it involves the idea of a 'real relation' to objects, events and
persons in the world.
The content of a belief or the meaning of an utterance is not derived merely from
the connection between beliefs or between beliefs and meaningful utterances.
Certainly such connection is a necessary condition for beliefs and utterances to have
content, but only if those beliefs and utterances are also connected to things in the
world can content enter into the picture at all. Indeed, even to speak in this way of
beliefs and utterances having content only if they are appropriately connected up
with things in the world can be misleading, since it can suggests a picture in which
there can be beliefs and utterances, albeit lacking in content, in separation from the
122 JEFFMALPAS

world. The very identity of a belief is a matter of the content of the belief - a matter
of what is held true - just as the identity of an utterance is a matter of the content of
what is uttered. Thus, when one talks of beliefs and utterances depending on the
obtaining of certain connections between those beliefs and utterances and the world
for those beliefs and utterances to have content, one is also referring to the
dependence of the very possibility of belief and of meaningful utterance on the
obtaining of such connections. In the absence of appropriate connections to the
world there can be neither belief nor meaning.
With respect to any specific belief, that it has some specific content depends on
the obtaining of the right causal connections between the belief and its object - "we
must, in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, take the object of a
belief to be the causes of that belief. And what we, as interpreters, must take them to
be is what they in fact are" (Davidson, 1990: p.132). In this respect Davidson has
sometimes referred to his position as involving a "causal theory of meaning" (or, we
might say, of belief) in contradistinction to the causal theory of reference associated
with Kripke and Putnam (See Davidson, 1990: p.137n.8). With respect to any body
of belief, however, that anyone of those beliefs has content depends on the rest of
those beliefs being, in the most basic cases, true. The nature of the connection
between a particular belief and the world that is determinative of that belief is
therefore a complex connection that involves the causal connectedness of that belief
with its object and the veridicality of the set of beliefs within which that belief is
itself embedded. It is this complex connection that I take Davidson to have been
referring when he talked in 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge', of the
need for both "correspondence" and "coherence" to play a role in knowledge
(Davidson, 1990: pp.120-122) and in his elaboration of charity in 'Three Varieties of
Knowledge' in terms, once again, of the twin principles of coherence and of
correspondence (see Davidson, 1991b: p.158f.
If we ask, in general, after the nature of that 'appropriate connection' that must
obtain between, not just a single belief, but a body of beliefs and the world, and
which is constitutive of that body of beliefs, then it is simply that those beliefs must,
in the simplest and most basic cases, be true - the existence, for instance, of
justificatory relations among beliefs is alone insufficient. This is, of course, much the
same lesson that Davidson draws in his well-known discussion of the scheme-content
distinction in 'On The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' (Davidson, 1984c). There
Davidson argues against conceptual relativism by attacking the idea of a language or
conceptual scheme as something that stands over against some empirical content and
that can vary independently of that content. Indeed, the only ways of characterising
the nature of the supposed relation between a scheme and its content - whether in
terms of notions of 'organising' or 'fitting' - turn out to be woefully inadequate to
support the thesis of conceptual relativism (see Davidson, 1984c: pp.191-l94). If we
try to clarify the idea of a conceptual scheme or language by reference to the relation
between it and the content - experience, 'sensory promptings' - that it fits, then this
can consist in no more than, in Davidson's words, "the simple thought that
something is an acceptable conceptual scheme or language if it is true. Perhaps we
 MAPPING THE STRUCTURE OF TRUTH 123

better say largely true in order to allow sharers of a scheme to differ on details"
(Davidson, 1984c: p.194)8. If we take beliefs or utterances in general and ask what
constitutes them as beliefs or as meaningful then there can be no other answer than
that they are 'largely true' or, at least (allowing for the difficulties in making sense of
the notion of 'largely true' here), that they are true in those basic cases that directly
concern the objects, persons and events with which we interact. One consequence of
this is, of course, that the idea of radical and widespread differences in belief - in
'conceptual scheme' - is rendered incoherent; another consequence ought to be a
recognition of the fundamental role of truth in the possibility of belief and the
impossibility of usefully replacing it in this role with any other notion.
One thing that becomes very clear at this point is the way in which Davidson's
insistence on the centrality of truth is closely connected to his rejection of global
scepticism. The same arguments that can be deployed to show why it is that truth is
indispensable to the possibility of belief (and the other attitudes), and to meaning,
also serve to show why it is absurd to suppose that most or all of our beliefs, even
our best justified, could be false. Since the possibility of belief rests on the
possibility of beliefs being 'appropriately connected' with objects and events in the
world, and since, with respect to beliefs in general, this requires that beliefs be, in the
most basic cases, true, so the very possibility of belief depends on the falsity of
global scepticism. One might claim, as some sceptics have, that this merely shows
that we could be mistaken even in the beliefthat we have beliefs, but such a response
seems problematic, to say the least. If most of our beliefs are indeed false, then we
cannot properly have beliefs at all, but in that case neither can we be mostly mistaken
in our beliefs, since there will in that case be nothing that can count as a belief, let
alone as a mistaken belief.
Given the difference between Rorty and Davidson on the question of truth, it is
not surprising to find that on the question of scepticism Rorty's position also
diverges slightly from Davidson's. Rorty has urged Davidson to stop trying to
answer the sceptic and to simply tell her or him to 'get 10st'lO. Although Davidson
has now said that he is inclined to go along with Rorty's advice on this point (see
Davidson, 1995, p.206), Davidson nevertheless always seems to have been
concerned - and still to be so concerned - to show just why it is that the sceptic can
be so summarily dismissed in a way that seems not to interest Rorty very much at all.
On this matter Davidson writes that "Where Rorty and I differ, if we do, is in the
importance we attach to the arguments that lead to the sceptic's undoing, and in the
interest we fmd in the consequences for knowledge, belief, truth and meaning. Rorty
wants to dwell on where the arguments have led: to a position which allows us to
dismiss the sceptic's doubts, and so to abandon the attempt to provide a general
justification for knowledge claims" (Davidson, 1990: p.137). Davidson appears, on
the other hand, to be as much interested in the arguments that ground the dismissal of
scepticism as in the dismissal itself. Indeed, he writes that "dismissing the sceptic is
not a simple matter. An argument is needed to see what is wrong with scepticism,
and this requires a correct understanding of the essential nature of the concepts of
judgement and of truth" (Davidson, 1995, p.206). For similar reasons, Davidson sees
124 JEFFMALPAS

the history of epistemology to be a much more illuminating story than Rorty would
apparently allow. Rorty rejects scepticism because he rejects the supposedly
epistemological picture out of which it arises; Davidson rejects much of that picture
too, but his rejection is part of a larger re-visioning of the central concepts that
remain at issue there. Here, then, Davidson's continued commitment to truth as a
central concept reflects his commitment to providing an account of knowledge even
in the face of the abandonment of the older epistemological paradigm inherited, on
the usual account, from Descartes.
Now, of course, nothing that I have said here so far, or that I have attributed to
Davidson, suffices to count as a complete explication of truth. Indeed, given the way
in which the Davidsonian approach seems to require the embedding of truth within a
much broader account of the structure of interpretation, and, as Davidson puts it, of
"the affective attitudes"lI, providing anything that even approaches such an
explication (and I hesitate at use of the word 'complete') would involve a much more
detailed and encompassing exposition than I have offered in these pages. Such a
more detailed exposition would involve nothing less than an account of what it is to
be a creature capable of the sort of rationally constrained belief and action that is
exemplified in the case of human beings. And this indicates to what an extent the
approach to the question of truth that I have been outlining here, and which I have
taken to be characteristic of Davidson's work, is quite different from most standard
approaches. The question of truth is not a narrowly semantic issue. Indeed, the
methodology that looks to understand truth as it is located within a landscape of
other concepts and practices forces us to recognise the way in which the project of
understanding truth cannot be separated from the much larger project of
understanding mind, meaning and action against the background of a world in which
these concepts are always and already embedded.
Truth is not reducible to any other notion, not because it is an intrinsically vague
or peripheral concept, but precisely because of the fundamental role it plays in the
very constitution of belief, reason, action and desire. What we learn from Davidson
is the way in which an adequate explication of the structure and content of truth is
also an explication of the structure of content. Understanding the role of truth in
relation to the possibility of content is consequently also to understand the way in
which the inquiry into truth is central to philosophical inquiry - as so much of the
philosophical tradition has assumed - for that inquiry does indeed encompass the
inquiry into the very possibility of belief, desire, knowledge and action. It is thus that
the Davidsonian account of truth does not aim at the definition of a particular
predicate, but rather at an explication of the complex character of agency and
meaning. In this respect, Davidson's rejection of reductionism about truth is indeed
intimately bound up with his rejection of definitional reduction in the philosophy of
mind. In both cases it is Davidson's insistence on understanding the concept at issue,
whether it be the concept of truth or the concept of a mental event, as part of a
broader system of concepts, from which it cannot properly be wrenched, that is the
central and determining feature of his approach.
 MAPPING THE STRUCTURE OF TRUTH 125

The Davidsonian approach is not, strictly speaking, deflationist about truth. Indeed,
given the way in which it seems to make the inquiry into truth inseparable from a
much broader set of issues, so one might take Davidson's approach to be positively
inflationary. Yet although that approach has a wide compass, it is also modest. Truth
on Davidson's account may be a central notion, but it is not therefore a
'transcendent' or metaphysical' concept. While offering a positive account of the
structure of truth, and so of the structure of content and the mind, Davidson also
charts the limits of the notion. So far as this latter point is concerned, Rorty is correct
to see his approach and that of Davidson, on which Rorty explicitly draws, as closely
aligned. But unlike Rorty, Davidson sees any account of the 'bounds' of truth to
itself depend on a positive account of the structure of truth, and so of knowledge,
belief and meaning. Davidson's 'modest' approach is consequently one that operates
within certain limits, and that is keenly aware of them, as well as of the limits of
philosophical inquiry as such, but it is also an approach that bases that grasp of limits
on a thorough and careful mapping of the nature of the territory that is at stake.
In the first Critique Kant criticises Home on the grounds that "he merely restricts
the understanding, without defining its limits, and while creating a general mistrust
fails to supply any determinate knowledge of the ignorance which for us is
unavoidable. For while subjecting to censorship certain principles of the
understanding, he makes no attempt to assess the understanding itself, in respect of
all its powers, by the assay-balance of criticism" (Kant, 1933: A767-768/B795-796).
Much the same criticism might be applied to Rorty and to any attempt 'to curb the
pretensions of reason' - or of philosophy - that does not also attempt to set out an
account of reason or philosophy as it operates within its own proper sphere. Like
Kant, Davidson seems to see the negative task of criticism to be predicated on a
more positive task - in Davidson's own case, on an account of the very 'structure
and content' of truth. Thus Davidson's critique of standard theories of truth and of
both sides in the realism/anti-realism debate presupposes his own positive account of
the relation between truth, meaning, belief and attitudes in general. This account is
one that attempts to view the fundamental concepts at issue as each enmeshed within
a single structure of interpretation - a structure that is delineated, not through peeling
away successive layers to reach an underlying foundation, but rather through an
exhibition of its 'topography' - through a laying-out of interconnections between
concepts rather than a reduction to more basic notions. In this respect the
Davidsonian account also embodies a particular conception of the task and proper
method of the philosophical project - a conception that, modest though it may be,
does not shrink from taking seriously the philosophical task, not merely of
delineating the limits, but also, in Kant's metaphor, of mapping the interior of that
'realm of understanding' that is also, quite properly, the 'land of truth' (Kant, 1933:
A235-236/B294-295).

Murdoch University (now Tasmania)

126 JEFFMALPAS

NOTES
I Here Davidson is explicit both in recognising the limitations in the Tarskian account, while also
acknowledging the fact that he has not always been clear on this matter himself. He writes "My
confusion ... is most apparent in 'Truth and Meaning' ... My mistake was to think we could both take a
Tarski truth definition as telling us all we need to know about truth and use the definition to describe an
actual language. But even in the same essay I (inconsistently) discussed how to tell that such a definition
applied to a language. I soon recognized the error" (Davidson, 1991a: p.286 n.20).
2 For a discussion and defence of the concept of truth, in the face of its relative 'unfashionability' within
the humanities and social sciences, see (Mal pas, 1996).
3 Davidson quotes Dummett with approval in (Davidson, 1991: p.286). It is noteworthy that in
(Dummett, 1990), Dummett argues against the view that the notion of 'justifiability' is adequate to
capture all that is needed from truth - Dummett's claim is that the concept of the truth of a statement "as
distinct from the cruder concept of its justifiability, is required .. .in virtue of the occurrence, as a
constituent of more complex sentences, of the sentence by means of which the statement is made"
(Dummett, 1990: p.7).
4 Charity is not a principle that admits of precise formulation (see Davidson, 1984a: p.xvii; Malpas,
1992: pp.155-156) and Davidson has offered a variety of versions of the principle in his writings. Given
the difficulties in making sense of phrases such as 'for the most part', I have tended to prefer
formulations that talk of the need to assume the truth of beliefs "in the simplest and most basic cases",
while acknowledging that even this way of speaking (along with other alternatives that talk, for instance,
of the overall veridicality of 'perceptual' or 'observational' beliefs) remains imprecise. The ideas that
underlie charity are also, as I note below, expressed in terms of the Davidsonian concept of
'triangulation' - see Davidson 1991 b.
5I say 'primarily' because obviously the practice of justification is one that serves other purposes too -
persuasion, maintenance of the social order, and so on.
6 One of the central features of Rorty's account has been his denial that there are any 'explanatory' uses
that attach to truth (see Rorty, 1987: pp.333-355; Rorty, 1995: p.286). In so far as a concept of truth is,
however, a necessary part of any account of the propositional attitudes and of the linguistic and doxastic
practices referred to above, so it would seem that a concept of truth does have an explanatory role to play
in just this respect - without it there can be no explanation of the structure and character of those
attitudes and practices.
7 It should be noted that here Davidson retains talk of coherence and correspondence as allied to charity,
even though he makes clear elsewhere that he rejects standard correspondence, as well as coherence,
theories of truth.
8 Davidson adds: "And the criterion ofa conceptual scheme different from our own now becomes: largely
true but not translatable. The question whether this is a useful criterion is just the question how well we
understand the notion of truth, as applied to language, independent of the notion of translation. The
answer is, I think, that we do not understand it independently at all."
9 For a more detailed discussion of the Davidsonian argument against scepticism see (Malpas, 1994).
to See, for instance (Rorty, 1987: pp.340-345), also (Davidson, 1990: p.136) and (Davidson, 1995,
p.206).
II "We recognized that truth must somehow be related to the attitudes of rational creatures; this relation
is now revealed as springing from the nature of interpersonal understanding ... The conceptual
underpinning of a theory of interpretation is a theory of truth; truth rests in the end on belief, and even
more ultimately, on the affective attitudes" (Davidson, 1991: p.326).
 MAPPING THE STRUCTURE OF TRUTH 127

REFERENCES
Davidson, Donald: 1984a, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Davidson, Donald: 1984b, 'Thought and Talk', in Davidson (1984a: pp.155-170).
Davidson, Donald: 1984c, 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', in Davidson (1984a: pp.183-98).
Davidson, Donald: 1990, 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge - Afterthoughts, 1987', in Alan
Malachowski (ed.), Reading Rorty, Oxford, Blackwell, pp.134-137.
Davidson, Donald: 1991 a, 'The Structure and Content of Truth' , Journal ofPhilosophy 87, 279-328.
Davidson, Donald: 1991b, 'Three Varieties of Knowledge', in A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.), A. J. Ayer:
Memorial Essays, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp.l 53-166.
Davidson, Donald: 1995, 'The Problem of Objectivity', Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 57, 203-210.
Davidson, Donald: 1996, 'The Folly of Trying to Define Truth', Journal ofPhilosophy 93, 263-278.
Dummett, Michael: 1978, Truth and Other Enigmas, London, Duckworth.
Dummett, Michael: 1990, 'The Source of the Concept of Truth', in George 80010s (ed.), Meaning and
Method: Essays in Honor of Hilary Putnam, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp.I-15.
Kant, Immanuel: 1933, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London, Macmillan.
Malpas, J. E.: 1992, Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press
Malpas, J. E.: 1994, 'Self-knowledge and Scepticism', Erkenntnis 40, 165-184.
Malpas, J. E. : 1996, 'Speaking the Truth', Economy and Society 25, 156-177.
Rorty, Richard: 1987, 'Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth', in E. lePore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation:
Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Oxford, Blackwell, pp.333-355.
Rorty, Richard: 1989, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard: 1995, 'Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Davidson vs. Wright', Philosophical Quarterly 45,
281-300.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig: 1976, Wittgenslein's Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics: Cambridge
/939, ed. Cora Diamond, Hassocks, Harvester.
 MANUEL GARCiA-CARPINTERO

THE EXPLANATORY VALUE OF TRUTH THEORIES

EMBODYING THE SEMANTIC CONCEPTION*

1. The purpose of this paper is, fIrstly, to propose a reply to a popular argument
against disquotational theories of truth; and, secondarily, to contribute in so doing to
clarifying the nature of such theories, in a specifIc way of interpreting them. There
are different, even contraposed ways of interpreting disquotationalism (see O'Leary-
Hawthorne and Oppy, 1997, for an examination of different dimensions along which
a truth-theory can be deflationary); as a paradigm of the sort of disquotational
theories I will be considering, I have in mind (what I take to be) Tarski's semantic
conception, as presented (with a carefully developed example of what a
disquotational theory would look like) in his classic 1936 paper. The semantic
conception takes as truth-bearers linguistic items (sentences, or uttered instances
thereof) which are already interpreted. Far from aiming to explicate what it is for
truth-bearers to have meaning, or propositional content (a proper part of the meaning
of truth-bearers), this variety of disquotationalism takes for granted that their having
the propositional content they possess is to be explicated (if illuminatingly explicated
at all) without resort to an independently analyzed truth-concept. (Interesting
Tarskian accounts are necessarily given for 'formalized' languages. However, they
are 'formalized' only in the sense that the truth-defmitions are given for languages
whose logical syntax has been made theoretically perspicuous; not in the sense that
they are uninterpreted formal languages, so that the truth-defInition is at the same
time a stipulation of the language's semantics.) The fundamental idea which informs
the semantic conception (the one which makes it a disquotational theory) is that, for
any potential candidate truth-bearer already endowed with meaning, the condition
ultimately asserted to obtain when truth is predicated of it is just that asserted in
asserting that candidate truth-bearer. Hence, there is a sort of redundancy in truth-
predications; although, strictly speaking, the semantic conception does not take truth
to be redundant, in that it takes the main function of the truth-predicate to lie in
allowing for the expression of general claims in which its use is not redundant.

2. The criticism I want to address has been made by Etchemendy (Etchemendy,

1988), Putnam (Putnam, 1985) and Soames (Soames, 1984); although the most
forceful version is in my view due to Soames (see particularly Soames, 1995 and
Soames, forthcoming), I will be for the most part addressing the argument as
presented in (Etchemendy, 1988), because this work is perhaps better known at the

129
J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), 129-148.
© J999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
130 MANUEL GARCiA-CARPINTERO

moment. In fact, the point can be traced back to Michael Dummett's classic 'Truth'
(see the outline in Dummett, 1978; given the difficulty many of us have in grasping
Dummett's views, it is fortunate that he has recently acknowledged - in Dummett,
1997 - that Etchemendy's argument is in fact close to his own). In a nutshell, the
point is the following: truth, as ordinarily understood, is such that truth-predications
entail informative, substantive, sometimes explanatorily valuable claims. However,
the truth-concept, as explicated by the semantic conception, cannot be used to make
claims with such properties. This is because the semantic conception purports to
define truth (or, at least, to offer a recursive axiomatic characterization) without
ultimately relying on semantic notions. As Michael Dummett says in a recent paper:
"Nothing can be simultaneously a theory and a definition. A semantic theory may
incorporate a defmition of truth, in the sense of laying down what it is for an
(indexed) sentence to be true; but it cannot embody a defmition of truth that consists
in a means of specifying the condition for each such sentence to be true, because
there would then be no more work for the theory to do" (Dummett, 1997, 5). If, per
impossibile, a semantic theory embodied a definition of truth, it would no longer be a
theory of any kind, let alone a semantic one. The thought is that, on the one hand, a
correct theory of meaning cannot but incorporate an account of the conditions under
which the truth-predicate applies to the sentences of the object-language: this follows
from its being a semantic theory. But, on the other hand, it has to be a theory, and
not a (mere) definition: that is to say, it has to be something substantive, something
which is not so easily obtained as defmitions are usually understood to be. My goal
is to show that this alleged incompatibility does not exist: the semantic conception
provides at the same time a defmition of sorts, together with the required type of
substantive information about the object-language.

3. In discussing the issue that we will be concerned with, namely, whether or not
truth, as explicated by the semantic conception, can be used in a substantive theory
of meaning, it is important to separate two projects which are pursued under the
common label 'theory of meaning'. I will distinguish them as a compositionality
theory of meaning and a philosophical explication of meaning. A compositionality
theory attempts to make explicit the laws that determine the meaning of complex
expressions on the basis of the meaning oflexical units and their logical category. It
is an assumption of such a theory that there are linguistic expressions (sentences or
instances thereof, or maybe - relative to how widely meaning-holism spreads -
larger 'units', like discourses, or whole fragments of languages) which have meaning
'in isolation' (to use Frege's term), independently of the meaning possessed by other
linguistic expressions. Another presupposition of the enterprise is that the meaning
of these units that have them in isolation is systematically determined on the basis of
the meanings of semantic units, whose meaning is not determined from the meanings
of their parts, but which, on the other hand, do not mean in isolation but in the
'context' of the more complex expressions which have meaning in isolation. The
theoretical goal of a compositionality theory of meaning is then to lay down
explicitly the meanings of the lexical units, and the way they contribute to the
 THE EXPLANATORY VALUE OF TRUTH THEORIES 131

meanings of the larger units, and to make explicit the laws relative to which the
meanings of the larger units which have meaning in isolation are systematically
obtained out of the asystematic meanings of the semantic units that lack meaning in
isolation, and the way they are put together with others. The development of the
project may well require, of course, to distinguish different types of 'meanings' that
the expressions may have. On the other hand, a philosophical theory of meaning is
an account of what sort of property, or relation, meaning is, and how it might relate
to other properties (for instance, physical properties of the meaning bearers or their
instances). Allegedly, it is the meaning of truth-bearers which such a theory should
be more fundamentally concerned to explicate; for they are the paradigm
meaning-bearers.

4. Davidson's suggestive idea that we might advance in the second project (devising
a philosophical theory of meaning) by reflecting on the nature of compositionality
theories, on the assumptions that have to be made to put them together, and on the
way to confirm or disconfirm them, has, in my view, engendered some confusion
related to my present topic. (I do not mean to suggest that there is any confusion in
Davidson's views, although I believe that some of his earlier writings on the topic
are at the very best misleading.) Put in terms of the previous distinction, the
complaint made by Etchemendy and the other philosophers is that truth, as explained
by the semantic conception, cannot be used to give the sort of substantive semantic
information which we expect from a compositionality theory. It is this claim that I
will be disputing.
On the other hand, I have already acknowledged that if truth can be
illuminatingly explicated as the semantic conception claims, then truth cannot be
used to provide a philosophical account of meaning or content (I will explain why
later). However, sometimes disquotational accounts in general, and the semantic
conception in particular, are criticized on the basis of arguments that would only
make sense if directed against an account purporting to be a philosophical theory of
meaning, and lack any force whatsoever regarding the issue of whether or not the
semantic conception is compatible with using truth to provide the sort of substantive
information regarding meaning given by compositionality theories. Thus, some
philosophers point out that Tarskian truth theories are given for specific languages,
and also that they rely at some point or other on definitions by enumeration of some
crucial semantic properties (the latter was the main theme of the already classic
Field, 1972). And these criticisms are made in contexts where it is the issue I will be
discussing here that is in question. Thus Dummett again, "it would be a strange
account of meaning that applied only to English sentences, and could not be
extended to sentences of other languages" (op. cit., 9); "as an explanation that will
satisfy a philosopher wishing to know what constitutes a sentence's having whatever
meaning it has, it is sadly deficient" (ibid., 10). It should be clear, however, that
these complaints are out of order when addressed to the issue of whether or not a
theory of truth can embody a compositionality theory. For, firstly, it is perfectly in
order that compositionality theories be restricted to specific languages: even if
l32 MANUEL GARCiA-CARPINTERO

Spanish, or the Spanish that someone speaks, were the only language that had ever
existed, to the extent that the main assumptions of this project are correct it would
still be worthwhile to construct a compositionality theory for it. And, secondly, it is
inevitable that compositionality accounts rely on lists, for systematically determined
linguistic properties are so determined on the basis of asystematically determined
ones: that is to say, on the basis of properties whose extension is linguistically
determined by enumeration.

5. Etchemendy makes explicit the claim I want to dispute in this way: "[a Tarskian
truth-defmition] appears, at least at first glance, to serve equally as a characterization
of the semantic properties of the language whose truth predicate is defined. [ ... ]
However the appearance is quite misleading [ ... ]." (Etchemendy, 1988, 52) And:
"the theory that results from a Tarskian definition of truth, whether we give a list-like
definition or the more familiar recursive definition, cannot posibly illuminate the
semantic properties of the object language. [ ... ] When we are out to characterize the
semantic properties of a language, say the meanings or truth conditions of its
sentences, our aim is simply orthogonal to Tarski's." (Ibid, 56-7.) The core of the
argument for this lies in the previously highlighted contrast between defmitions and
theories. This is elaborated by using two different sorts of considerations. The first is
easier to grasp by considering first 'list-like' defmitions. If we wanted to give a
Tarskian truth-definition for a finite language, or fragment thereof, the defmition
could take a list-like form. The following could be an accurate definition embodying
the semantic conception for a fragment including only two Catalan sentences:

(D) For every sentence cr of C, cr is T if and only if cr = 'la neu es groga' and
snow is yellow, or cr = 'algunes pomes son vermelles' and some apples are
red.

Now, compare (1) with (2); both concern a sentence belonging to C, the relevant
fragment of Catalan, and differ only in that (1) uses the term expressing the ordinary
truth-concept while (2) uses the term we have just defined.

(1) 'La neu es groga' is true in C iff snow is yellow

(2) 'La neu es groga' is T in Ciffsnow is yellow.

(1) entails some information about the meaning of 'la neu es groga' in the object
language. It does not follow from (1), of course, that 'la neu es groga' means in
Catalan that snow is yellow; it is compatible with the truth of (1) that the sentence' la
neu es groga' has a totally different meaning in Catalan. In fact, it is compatible with
(1) that the sentence asserts in Catalan any proposition materially equivalent to the
proposition expressed by the English sentence 'snow is yellow'. But more modest
claims about the meaning of 'la neu es groga' do follow from (1). For instance, it
follows that 'la neu es groga' does not mean in Catalan, say, that snow is not yellow,
 THE EXPLANATORY VALUE OF TRUTH THEORIES 133

or that snow is white. For, given an intuitively existing relationship between the
properties expressed by 'means' and 'is true', if 'la neu es groga' meant in Catalan
that snow is white, then it should be true that 'la neu es groga' is true in Catalan iff
snow is white; but this is incompatible with what (I) says. Thus, (I) involves some
information about meaning - in the sense of 'meaning' in which a compositionality
theory for Catalan attempts to provide a systematic characterization of the meanings
of the Catalan sentences. In contrast, Etchemendy contends, (2) does not provide any
information about the content of 'la neu es groga' in Catalan. Given that snow is not
yellow, and that some apples are red, it follows from (D) that 'T' applies to the
sentence 'algunes pomes son vermelles', and does not apply to 'la neu es groga'.
This is compatible with 'T' expressing a number of properties of those sentences in
Catalan; for instance, with 'T' expressing the property of having plural morphemes,
or that of including a 'p', or that of being my favourite four-word Catalan sentence
... or, of course, that of being a true sentence in Catalan. A predicate which could be
interpreted as expressing any of these properties does not properly express any of
them. Moreover, as Soames and Etchemendy stress, this conclusion is reached
independently of the assumption that the fragment was fmite, and the defmition has
been given essentially by enumeration. Anybody who grasps the point will see that,
if the fragment had been richer and the definition given in a more interesting-
looking, recursive way, essentially the same conclusion would follow. All that such a
definition does is to state conditions for a certain predicate to apply to the sentences
in the intended fragment (the fragment could even be the entire Catalan language).
By itself, the definition does not say enough regarding the property of sentences that
the predicate expresses for that property to have to be one related to meaning l .

6. A second elaboration of the same point relies on modal considerations. It is

claimed that any disquotational analysis of truth will render modal statements like
the following equivalent:

CI if we had used the word 'white' differently, 'grass is white' might have been
true

C2 if we had used the word 'white' differently, grass might have been white.

The reason, again, is that the equivalence between "'la neu es groga' is T" and 'snow
is yellow' (or the corresponding one between "'grass is white' is T*" and 'grass is
white') follows from a definition; it, therefore, should allow substitutions even inside
modal contexts (it states something that holds 'across possible worlds'). However, no
theory using the truth concept to state the semantic properties of a language (in
particular, the contents of truth-bearers) should have this consequence; for,
intuitively, on such a use of the truth-predicate the first counterfactual should count
as correct, and the second as false.
134 MANUEL GARCIA-CARPINTERO

7. These arguments are, I think, valid. However, if directed against the semantic
conception, they are not sound; or so I am going to argue. The arguments depend on
a crucial assumption; namely, that the content of 'is T in C is wholly contained in
the defmition «D), in our example, or its more complex recursive counterparts, in
examples like the one provided by Tarski in his classic paper 'The Concept of Truth
in Formalized Languages'). I think that there is no good reason to accept this, and
that there is a good reason not to accept it. The reason for not accepting it is the
following: if the assumption were correct, it should not make any sense to wonder
whether a claim like (2) is acceptable. 'is T in C, according to the assumption made
by Putnam, Soames and Etchemendy, is simply a predicate whose application
conditions have been simply stipulated in a determinate way. It follows from the
stipulation that the condition for 'is T in C to apply to the Catalan sentence 'la neu
es groga' is that snow be yellow, and thus (given the facts) that 'is T in C does not
apply to that Catalan sentence; period. There is no more to say about the matter.
However, in my view it does make sense to consider whether, say, given that (2)
follows from the defmition, 'is T in C has been correctly characterized, or whether it
is an acceptable consequence that 'is T in C does not apply to 'la neu es groga'. (2),
or sentences of the same sort, can be taken as a refotation of the so-called
'definition' from which they follow. (After I have presented my own proposal and
shown how it handles different criticisms, I will come back to this argument and
discuss an alternative way in which the critics can try to handle the possibility of
evaluating truth definitions as correct or otherwise; see Section 10.)

8. The specific way in which I propose to capture this point is as follows. We should
understand that, in addition to what the assumption in the arguments by Putnam,
Soames and Etchemendy already put in it, there is more to the content of a predicate
like 'is T in C. For present concerns, it will be enough to include Tarski's material
adequacy condition (although I believe that there is even more to it). More
specifically, the content of the predicate 'is T in C includes two parts. Firsly, it
includes what we may call a definitional condition; this is just what the argument we
are considering assumes that exhausts its content. For the case at stake of 'is T in C,
this part predicates of any candidate truth-earer cr the condition expressed in the
right-hand side of (D), namely, that it is identical to 'la neu es groga' and snow is
yellow, or it is identical to 'algunes pomes son vermelles' and some apples are red.
Secondly, it is also part of what is expressed in attributing the predicate to a
candidate cr that it follows from the (previous) definitional condition applying to cr
an instance of schema T for this truth bearer; the schema being characterized by
making an explicit reference to the meanings, or propositional contents, of the
truth-bearers: the right-hand side asserts the propositional content expressed by the
truth-bearer mentioned in the left-hand side. Again for the example at stake of 'is T
in C, the second part predicates of any candidate truth-bearer cr that it follows from
the right-hand side of (D) applying to cr a biconditional that makes necessary and
 THE EXPLANATORY VALUE OF TRUTH THEORIES 135

sufficient for 'is T in C to apply to a the condition constituting a's actual

propositional content in c.
For any candidate truth-bearer a of which 'is T in C is predicated, the claim
made about it in the second part may be false; for that claim requires from the
definition (D) a certain fit with the actual semantic properties of the expression in
that language. (This, by the way, provides a natural understanding of the locution 'is
T in C: is T given the semantic properties that candidate truth-bearer actually has in
C.) Taking this to be a part of what is said when 'is Tine is predicated of something
explains therefore why it makes sense to consider whether, say, (2) is correct, or
whether the fact that it follows from the definitional part of the concept expressed by
'is T in C makes it objectionable. More to the present point, given this interpretation
of what 'is T in C predicates, no argument like the ones rehearsed above can be
launched. In fact, under this interpretation exactly the same information about the
meaning of 'la neu es groga' in Catalan follows from (2) as it follows from (1). If 'is
T in C has been introduced by means of a truth-definition materially adequate in
Tarski's sense, then it cannot be the case that 'la neu es groga' means in Catalan that
snow is white; for, if that were so, then it would be the case that 'la neu es groga is T
in C iff snow is white, which is incompatible with what (2) says. Similarly, it can be
easily shown (along the lines of the considerations I developed in (Garcia-
Carpintero, 1996a), further elaborated in (Garcia-Carpintero, 1998) that modal
claims like C 1 and C2 above cannot be equivalent, when a predicate understood as I
have proposed regarding 'is T in C replaces 'true', and thus that a modal version of
the argument cannot succeed either.

9. The proposal I just made undoubtedly raises many questions; I will address what I
take to be the most urgent in a moment. Let me say to begin with that it is a crucial
feature of my view that the 'status' of a predicate introduced to express a Tarskian
truth-definition is not that of a defined term (in the strict sense of 'definition': a set
of necessary and sufficient conditions that the term is intended to abbreviate), but
that of a predicate introduced to express what Rudolf Carnap called the explicatum
in an explication (see Carnap, 1962, 1-8), for the specific case of truth. To explicate
a concept only intuitively understood (the explicandum) is to explicitly introduce a
new concept (the explicatum) meeting several conditions: similarity to the
explicandum, exactness, fruitfulness, simplicity. A crucial part of what makes a
predicate defined along Tarskian lines apt to be considered as introducing an
explication of the concept expressed by 'true' is precisely the connection with
meaning (with the content independently possessed by the truth-bearers) expressed in
Tarski's material adequacy condition. Tarski emphasizes that proper instances of
schema T can be considered "partial definitions of truth". In virtue of grasping the
expJicandum (the intuitive concept of truth), a speaker knows that proper instances
of schema T are true (they are thus, in an epistemic-not-metaphysical sense, true "in
virtue of' the meaning of 'true'), and also that they embody all that there is to say for
any particular case regarding the correct application of the truth predicate to it;
136 MANUEL GARCIA-CARPINTERO

additionally, such a speaker knows this in general, for any truth-bearer he can
understand.
An essential part of the explication is the claim that its defmitional part achieves
this effect for the defmed term; for it is by achieving this effect that the account can
pass as such an explication, and a disquotational one at that. A crucial factor in the
wide acceptance of Tarski's proposal derives in fact from the realization that it
captures, and accounts for, the fact (in essence, already pointed out by Aristotle) that
individual instances of schema T constitute 'partial definitions' of truth; that is to
say, that they are known a priori, as part of our understanding of the truth concept.
(This is witnessed, for instance, by the well-known 'comersions' of Carnap and
Popper, given the reasons provided by the converted.) Soames (1995) quibbles about
the aprioricity of claims like 'snow is white' is true in English iff snow is white, on
the basis of doubts that may arise about the nature of English, so called. However, as
I indicate in (Garcia-Carpintero, 1997), it is quite enough for all our present concerns
if the relevant instances of schema T are understood to be of this form: 'snow is
white' is true in my English-idiolect iff snow is white; and Soames' related
arguments are not sound for this specific case2•
The defmitional part is also important, specially in that it gives exactness to the
explicatum. A fully-fledged presentation of the explicatum would require the
inclusion of some additional elements in the content of the defmed predicate 'is T in
C; they would be mainly intended to deal with the semantic antinomies (thus
achieving another of the goals of Carnapian explications: replacing the intuitive
concept by a concept less likely to cause confusions and perplexities) and to make
salient a certain 'epistemic neutrality', or 'Aristotelian' character, of the truth
concept. Discussion of these further aspects, however, is not needed for the goals of
the present paper, and is beyond its scope. Summarizing briefly the main point so
far: the semantic conception offers an explication, not just a definition, according to
which a correct grasp of the truth concept involves two aspects. Firstly, to associate
in a general way with any truth-attribution a condition which does not need to
involve truth or other related notions like reference and satisfaction; and, secondly,
to know that the condition thus associated is precisely that constituting the
propositional content of the truth-bearer.

10. In the next three sections I will be discussing several reasons that might
conceivably be put forward to oppose the proposal I have advanced. The one that
comes to mind most immediately would be the complaint that I am not in fact
replying to the arguments, but changing the terms of the debate. Etchemendy,
Putnam and Soames were assuming something that manifestly should be taken for
granted by both parties to the dispute; namely, that Tarskian definitions are
defmitions in the ordinary sense of the term, and that, therefore, they should not be
understood as including something like my 'second part', with its substantive claims
about the meaning of the truth-bearers. However, I do not think this is the case. My
argument for this has two parts. First, I want to point out that there are plenty of
indications in Tarski's writings to the effect that he is not merely introducing a term
 THE EXPLANATORY VALUE OF TRUTH THEORIES 137

by stipulation, but giving something like a Carnapian explication: ''the desired

definition does not aim to specify the meaning of a familiar word used to denote a
novel notion; on the contrary, it aims to catch hold of the actual meaning of an old
notion" (Tarski, 1944,341). Remarks like this appear in all his writings about truth;
and they are not marginal (like his allegiance to physicalism, of which Field, 1972,
made so much), but appear at crucial points. Even more importantly, I think that
there is plenty of evidence that one of Tarski's main concerns was to defend that
there is a coherent concept of truth close to the ordinary one which should not be
confused with any epistemic notion, like provability. (probably the support for
Tarski's theory is recruited on the basis that this 'epistemic neutrality' of his truth-
concept is felt to be indeed close to that of the intuitive concept.) This, of course,
also requires to see his definition as an attempt at a Carnapian explication.
Now, I do not deny that Tarski himself, even in spite of his clear-headedness
regarding the status of the concept he introduced as an explication, together with
other philosophers who have supported his theory, might have granted to the authors
whose argument I am discussing the point now under dispute, refusing to give to the
material adequacy condition the theoretical role it has in my account. They may just
have failed to see the requirements which follow from Tarski's attempt at giving an
explication; perhaps we could explain this on the basis of beliefs (or confusions)
which are independent of Tarski's main claims about the truth-concept. (I have in
mind here Tarski's well-known skepticism about 'meanings' and the enterprise of
philosophical analysis.) Indeed, I concede that some aspects of Tarski's writings
point in that direction (see below, § 13). I do not deny, either, that Etchemendy,
Putnam and Soames have shown something very interesting. It is only that in my
view they have not established what they claim to. What they have in fact shown is
that it is unacceptable to take a Tarskian defmition, as they understand it, to
constitute a Carnapian explication; for the consequences presented in Sections 5 and
6 are indeed incompatible with the concept in question being at all a successful
explication of the ordinary truth concept. (This would be contested by
disquotationalist of the 'minimalist' affiliation; see below, Section 14, for a brief
indication of my view on these proposals.)
My sleight of hand (if that is what it may be called), however, consist only
in putting the material adequacy condition to a different use than it has in the critics'
view; and, as we have seen, just by so doing it restores to the proposal its chance of
counting as a Carnapian explication, and everything that goes with it (including
something very dear to Tarski, the ability of the conception to vindicate a neat
distinction between truth and proof). The material adequacy condition itself figures,
and prominently, in Tarski's writings for everybody to see. I conclude that my
proposal is better than the assumption the critics make, in that the proposal offers an
interpretation of the semantic theory of truth more consistent, everything considered,
than the one that they assume.
Take, for instance, Soames' attitude. He acknowledges that, as pointed out in
Section 7, the way he understands Tarskian truth-defmitions it does not make sense
to consider whether or not a claim like (2) is correct (true) or otherwise. Still, ''the
138 MANUEL GARCIA-CARPINTERO

correctness of the definition, in the sense of serving the purposes for which it was
intended, might still be questioned. A Tarskian truth defmition may naturally be
viewed as an attempt to explicate the ordinary notion of truth by providing a
precisely defined concept that is both coextensive with it over the object language,
and capable of playing the theoretical roles demanded of the ordinary notion"
(Soames, 1997a, 84). Soames' idea is that normative questions regarding Tarskian
truth-predicates should be understood as practical questions about the use that we
can make of them, in view perhaps of the intentions with which they were
introduced. Precisely on the basis of the arguments we are disputing, however,
Soames contends that these practical questions should be answered in the negative
(see So ames, 1997b). Tarskian truth-predicates (understood as Soames presupposes)
cannot be used to fulfill all theoretical roles that we assign to a genuine truth-
concept, as witnessed by the intuitive failures to properly capture the semantic
dimension of such a genuine truth-predicate that the arguments in Sections 5-6
manifest. But this failure, as far as we can see, disappears from view if we take the
material adequacy condition the way I have proposed, and consequently understand
the relavant normative questions as genuinely concerning the truthfulness or
otherwise of claims made with the defined predicate. At the very least, it seems clear
to me that anybody at all sympathetic to those features of Tarski's theory which I
have highlighted should opt for this, rather than, say, to attribute to truth-predicates
embodying the semantic conception the very meager theoretical role reserved for
them in (Soames, 1984) (namely, that of acting as devises for defining 'possible
languages', correlations of possible sentences with possible semantic values).
The claim I make, thus, is that the present proposal gives explicit expression to
an interpretation of Tarski's semantic theory of truth which is natural to adopt, given
everything included in Tarski's writings and the importance it appears to has in them.
This is the only claim needed to rebut the objection that the assumption in the
arguments I criticize that Tarskian 'defmitions' are defmitions properly so called
cannot be abandoned without changing the terms of the debate. By so doing, as we
will see, we are in a position to disprove the claim by Etchemendy quoted at the
beginning of Section 5.
One more relevant consideration in this vein is the following. Philosophers
(including the ones whose arguments I am criticizing) speak freely in the singular of
a certain 'Tarskian theory (or definition) of truth'. Notice, however, that it would be
ludicrous to speak this way if Tarski's 'theory' consisted in fact of unrelated
stipulations of meaning for scores of different predicates, most of them lacking any
relationship whatsoever that join them together to any extent. According to my
proposal, however, every truth predicate shares something with any other, that is to
say, the 'second part'. (They would share also those other aspects I am setting aside
for the sake of brevity and focus.) This, moreover, is the philosophically crucial
aspect; it is from here that the 'epistemic neutrality' and 'Aristotelian character' of
the concept can be claimed to follow. Thus, the present proposal allows us naturally
to distinguish the semantic conception of truth (encompassing the features common
to all truth predicates and their philosophical consequences), from its different
 THE EXPLANATORY VALUE OF TRUTH THEORIES 139

embodiments (the particular definitions, incorporating the 'defmitional part' specific

for every language). It remains to be seen how the alternative proposal could achieve
something comparable3 •

11. By in effect taking Tarski's criterion of material adequacy to be part of what is

predicated when the defined predicate is used, we are as a result taking any assertion
involving 'T' to involve the claim that 'T' applies to all and only the true sentences
of the object language (or to all and only clear instances of 'true' sentences). This
follows from the specific proposal I have advanced regarding Tarskian explications
of the truth-concept. It follows also more directly from the general proposal I would
make regarding how to capture in general the point I have made about 'T', which in
fact can be made regarding any predicate which expresses a Camapian explication of
the concept expressed by any pre-existing predicate. Any such explication is not a
stipulative defmition; it involves in effect a semantic account of how the target
predicate works, and should be taken to involve, among other things, the claim that
the old and the new predicate have the same extension in clear cases (this is the
minimal aspect of the condition of 'similarity' in Camap's characterization of
explications). Returning to the specific case we are considering here, this means that
any claim involving 'T' makes also use of the explained notion, namely, that
expressed by 'true'. This can be thought to be objectionable either on a specific
basis, a reason having to do with the specific nature of the concept explicated in this
particular case - truth - and in particular with one of the main tenets of the
disquotational explication of it, or on a more general basis, one having to do with the
nature of philosophical analysis in general.
The more general arguments are easily disposed of. One such argument would
object that my proposal violates some legitimate aspiration for genuine explanations
of the meaning of a given term; namely, that the explanation should serve to explain
the concept expressed by the term to someone who does not already have it, or that it
should not be intelligible only to someone who already grasp the concept.
(Aspirations such as these are implied to be legitimate in Dummett, 1975, 100-103.)
My reply to this is easily given: such aspirations are not legitimate, but absurd; they
manifest a deep confusion about the goals of philosophical analysis, even if a
widespread one. Consider the following: as I said before, a compositionality theory
for a language should be able to provide explanatory, substantive information even
to competent speakers of the language. But in fact, it is only the explanatory
information that can be given even to a competent speaker which a compositionality
theory should be concerned to provide. It is not the point of such a theory to serve as
a way to acquire the ability to speak and understand the language, but to give
explanatory information about its structure to people already able to do that. It is
exactly the same with philosophical analysis, and for the same reasons4 •
Another objection which can be counted as general (for similar points could be
made about extensions of the view here elaborated to Camapian explications in
general) is made in a criticism by Soames of the present proposal, as (too briefly
perhaps to be properly appraised) presented in a previous article (Garcia-Carpintero,
140 MANUEL GARCiA-CARPlNTERO

1997). It is a consequence of the inclusion of the criterion of material adequacy as

part of what truth-predications comprise that "any use of a Tarskian truth predicate
would involve covert mention of it" (Soames, op. cit., 82). Soames finds this highly
objectionable ("extraordinary"), in that it involves "a blurring of the distinction
between use and mention". "Normally" says Soames, "when we give a defmition, we
do not interpret all predications in which we use the defmed term as making claims
about the defmed term, and expressions containing it" (Soames, op. cit., ibid).
Notice first, however, that although the present proposal may be described as
"blurring" that distinction, which may prove confusing to some readers, the
presentation 1 have offered previously of the content of truth-predications embodying
the semantic conception should make clear that there is strictly speaking no
confusion of use and mention. (None, at least, that 1 can see, and Soames does not
say otherwise: he only complains of the borderline being perhaps difficult to be
seen.) The proposal certainly has it that a self-referential mention of the predicate is
part of the content attributed whenever truth is predicated, but this, by itself, cannot
be counted as a case of mixing up use and mention. Secondly, Soames may well be
right about what we "normally" do and do not do when we give a defmition. But in
the present case, as 1 have been emphasizing, we are not just "giving a definition";
we are producing an explication. And 1 do not find at all "extraordinary" that the
semantic knowledge that a competent user associates with a certain predicate can be
seen, when fully explicitated, to include metalinguistic conditions involving the
predicate, which should be captured in an adequate explication.

12. Let us now move to more specific objections. A very important motivation for
Tarski's defmition was to show how we could have a truth predicate free from the
threat posed by the semantic paradoxes. Any non-prejudiced reader should see that
the two overriding motivations for Tarski were to give a precise defmition of a truth-
concept whose application is independent of epistemic criteria, and whose
application does not entail the contradictions constituting the well-known semantic
antinomies. Given this, says Etchemendy correctly, "Tarski's concern about the
consistency of the concept of truth, his principal motivation for the enterprise, places
a premium on the eliminability of our defmition of truth." (Etchemendy, 1988, 54.)
This, incidentally, is why Davidson is badly wrong when he says: "I think that Tarski
was not trying to defme the concept of truth - so much is obvious - but that he was
employing that concept to characterize the semantic structures of specifIc languages"
(Davidson, 1996, 269). Davidson would have a hard time finding evidence in
Tarski's writings which justifies attributing to him any serious interest in
"characterizing the semantic structure of specific languages", in the Davidsonian
understanding which is obviously present in this context. Be that as it may, it is clear
in any case that Tarski would have opposed any unconcerned use of an undefmed
truth-predicate, precisely because he would have seen the specter of the antinomies
lurking behind it.
Now, according to the proposal we have advanced, however, predications of the
explicated notion expressed by 'T' do involve (as 1 in fact acknowledged at the
 THE EXPLANATORY VALUE OF TRUTH THEORIES 141

beginning of the previous section) "an uneliminated use" of the old notion expressed
by 'true'. Because of this, Etchemendy contends that claims such as the one I have
included as part ofa Tarskian explication "are most emphatically not part of Tarski's
project, but in an obvious sense conflict with it, involving as they do the
uneliminated use ofa notion of truth" (Etchemendy, 1988,60.)
Consider, however, any semantically significant explanation of the meaning of a
pre-existing term. The infamous 'bachelor' is well suited to my purposes. To the
extent that the explanation is significant at all - i.e., to the extent that it provides
enlightening information even to its competent users, at least in helping them to
know explicitly and reflectively what they tacitly know already - the explanation
could be conveyed by using the technique of Camapian explication. That is to say,
we could introduce a new predicate, give a clear account of its meaning, and claim
that it has some interesting relationships with the explicated predicate: it is
coextensive with it in clear cases, it is more precise, it serves the same explanatory
purposes, and so on. We can thus defme 'B' by saying that 'B' applies, among
human beings in general, to those who are unmarried adults. Because we can wonder
whether certain consequences of this definition are correct (David Kaplan once
asked whether the Pope is a bachelor, although he is certainly a B), and in fact can
take some of them as refutations of the so-called 'definition', a proposal similar to
the one I made regarding 'T' can be considered in this case too: the content of 'B'
involves thus the claim that paradigm bachelors are paradigms Bs. Hence, any
predication of 'B' involves an 'uneliminated use' of a notion of bachelorhood.
Still, as this example clearly suggests, among all the predicates that introduce
explications of already existing notions, and therefore involve uneliminated uses of
those already existing notions in the acknowledged way, there is still room to make
an interesting distinction. To avoid potential confusions engendered by equivocity, I
will give Etchemendy the term 'eliminability' and use 'reducibility' instead. There
will be explications that can be taken to show that the explicated concept can be
reduced to other concepts; and there will be explications that do not show this, or
even explications which show the opposite. In the present terms, Humeans about
causality claim that 'cause' can be explicated by introducing a term whose explicit
defmition does not use 'cause' nor any term which, in its tum, can only be explicated
using 'cause'. David Lewis' views, if correct, will also put 'cause' in this group.
Other contemporary philosophers, like Sydney Shoemaker, however, would claim
that 'cause' is not reducible; it can indeed be explicated, but the account ofthe term
introduced for that purpose will make use of terms - like 'property' - which in their
tum are to be explicated in terms of 'cause'. In summary, every interesting
explanation of the meaning of any term will make, if I am right, an 'uneliminated
use' of the concept, and therefore will make it 'uneliminable' by recourse to the
explication in the only sense we can grant Etchemendy's point. But we can still make
sense of a distinction, among all terms which lend themselves to informative
accounts of their meaning, between the reducible (,bachelor', I suppose) and the
unreducible ones ('cause', if Shoemaker's views are correct). Indeed, if we think
about it, Etchemendy's point that a concept such as truth on the present proposal has
142 MANUEL GARCiA-CARPINTERO

been 'uneliminably' explicated only expresses a comparatively very minor fact:

namely, the fact that the explication is given for thinkers who already have the
concept, albeit in a tacit form. It leaves open whether or not the concept is reducible.
By now the relevance of this for the preceding discussion should be clear. It is
not the eliminability of the truth concept what (we can assume) the semantic
paradoxes make desirable, but its reducibility. By contending that the present
proposal makes uneliminated use of the truth concept (which I certainly grant),
Etchemendy leaves open the question whether or not it is reducible; but this is the
only issue which is related to the threat possed by the semantic paradoxes. Therefore,
whatever our views are regarding the desirability or of the reducibility of the truth
concept, Etchemendy's argument is unuseful to make the point he wants to make,
and is therefore unsound.
On this same issue, and elaborating on what I said in the last paragraph of
Section 10, I would like to comment on the other aspect of what Davidson
presupposes in the text quoted at the beginning of this section. He presupposes there
that it is obvious that according to Tarski there is not a unique concept of truth. This
is certainly the case, but not, I am afraid, for the reasons that Davidson suggests and
(because of that) not if taken as Davidson appears to take it. Tarski did not have a
high opinion of the project of analysing ordinary concepts, in part because, in
agreement with Quine, he seems to have been very skeptical about the extent to
which it is determinate what belongs and does not belong inside the contours of an
ordinary concept. At several points he is prepared to grant (although I feel that only
in a condescending manner) to traditional correspondence, coherence and pragmatist
theorists that there may be ordinary concepts (different in any case from the
Aristotelian one he wanted to make precise) corresponding to their respective
projects. This is the reason why I would concur with Davidson's presupposition, and
this reason indicates the way I take it. I would reject Davidson's suggestion if the
point were instead that every specific Tarskian defmition embodying the semantic
conception for a particular language constitutes a different concept from any other,
equally embodying it but given for a different language (the way, for instance, that
the truth-concept for a given object-language sufficiently rich to express classic
arithmetic contained in a metalanguage is different from any truth-concept
expressible in that object-language). In my understanding of Tarski, in cases like this
there is still according to him only one 'concept' at stake (the 'Aristotelian' concept),
the only one everybody seems to have in mind when reference is made to 'Tarski's
theory' in the singular; this hermeneutic contention is related to the distinction I
made at the end of Section 10 between the semantic conception and its different
specific embodiments.
Davidson's point, I am afraid, is precisely this one I would reject, as witnessed by
his insistence throughout the paper I am discussing that Tarski 'proved' what other
philosophers have claimed to be the case, namely, that it is not possible to defme
truth (op. cit., 265). In my view, Davidson is comparing heterogeneous magnitudes
here. The philosophers in question - Davidson himself included - have claimed that
it is not possible to provide a philosophical reductive anal~is of truth. But it is not
 THE EXPLANATORY VALUE OF TRUTH THEORIES 143

in the nature of a mathematical proof like Tarski's undefinability result to establish

something like this. A philosophical argument could of course resort to the
mathematical result, but the result surely depends on many premises that have to be
philosophically appraised before any conclusion is reached. For instance, Tarski's
result crucially depends on the assumption of bivalence. As Kripke has shown,
however, for all this result establishes we could still hope to have a unique truth-
concept, if we are prepared to buy truth-value gaps. Whether or not truth is
'defmable', in the sense that interest Davidson and the other philosophers who deny
it, cannot just depend on this: anybody entertaining the philosophical reduction of
truth would be happy to take a few truth-value gaps in his stride, I suppose, if that is
all that is required. As I have suggested, I think that on this issue Tarski and
Davidson are in different camps; Tarski would have contended that there is only one
interesting and precise enough conception of truth, the semantic one, and that it
shows truth to be reducible (and because of that in itself free of giving rise to
contradictions). What is clear, in any case, is that Davidson cannot simply enlist here
the support of Tarski's undefmability result the way he does.

13. A second specific criticism is related to the objection discussed in § 10, that
instead of answering the critics' objections my proposal just alters their target. Tarski
insists at several points that his definition allows for the reducibility of truth in favor
only of non-semantic concepts (unless, of course, the object language itself already
includes them)5. My proposal is, of course, at odds with this; any truth predication
involves explicit reference to semantic concepts (specifically, that of the
propositional content expressed by a truth-bearer). But I do not take this to be a
serious objection, for the reasons advanced in Section 10. I simply contend that
Tarski was wrong about this, and that he paid here the price for his Quinean lack of
warmth towards meanings and related creatures of darkness. As shown by the
arguments we are discussing, it is not possible to offer an explication of truth (which,
as we have seen, is required by aspects of his project very dear to him) without
having recourse to any semantic notions.
After previous presentations of this material, Peter Simons and Jan Wolenski
independently referred me to a discussion between Maria Kokoszynska and Tarski
following Kokoszynska's reading of her paper 'W sprawie wzglednosci i
bezwglednosci prawdy' (On the relativity and absoluteness of truth), Przeglad
Filozojiczny XXXIX, 1936, 424-425. Wolenski kindly provided a translation of the
relevant material, which I summarize here because I think it is very significant in the
present context. One of Kokoszynska's main theses in her paper is that the concept
of truth should be 'relativized' to the concept of meaning. Tarski asks whether it
would be simpler to take the relativization to be to the concept of language, which
seems clearer and logically less complicated than the concept of meaning?
Kokoszynska replies that that may be so, if languages are individuated not just by the
well-formed combinations of sounds or inscriptions belonging to them, but also by
their correct translations into the language in which the definition is given. If
languages are only individuated 'formally', i.e. in the first way, then any
144 MANUEL GARCIA-CARPINTERO

truth-defmition for a language should be taken to be additionally relative to the way

of translating its sentences into sentences of the language in which the definition is
carried out.
Consider the following claims, which one frequently finds in Davidson's
writings: "Of course, a theory of truth is not treated as empirical if its adequacy is
judged only in terms of the T-sentences it entails, and T-sentences are verified only
by their form; this happens if we assume the object language is contained in the
metalanguage" (Davidson, 1980, 73). And "in those cases where the object language
is contained in the metalanguage, the requirement [convention T] is merely
syntactical: it tells us something about the predicates, but not much about the
concept" (Davidson, 1990, 295-6). Kokoszynska's point, however, is that the
adequacy of a theory of truth can never be judged in a purely 'syntactical' way. It
may be established a priori, I would say, in the case of a truth-defmition explicitly
given for my idiolect in a metalanguage including it; but this does not make the
relevant verifications dependent only on matters of 'form'. This is exactly what the
present proposal entails. In a later letter to Tarski (6/17/1950, original in Bancroft
Library, Berkeley), Kokoszynska's questioned Tarski's appreciation of the
philosophical implications of his own work; I tend to concur with her also on this
questioning.
The arguments by the critics we are considering, on the other hand, assume in
fact that the languages for which the definition is given are individuated just
'syntactically'; it is not that they are assumed to lack semantic properties, it is just
that their semantic properties are irrelevant to the truth-defmition. The defmition is
assumed to proceed as a stipulation for the application of the truth-predicate to the
sentences, formally individuated. This is why the modal argument briefly presented
in Section 6 can take hold (as I explain in detail in Garcia-Carpintero, 1996a): in
every possible world, no matter what use the speakers of a language to which the
phrase 'grass is white' belongs (a language which, remember, is individuated only
relative to which forms constitute well-formed sentences) make of it, the phrase is
true iff grass is white, as a matter of 'logic plus definitions'. This, of course, would
not be the case if the definition were relativized to the actual meanings of the
sentences, in the way in which it is relativized if every ascription of truth entails, as
has been suggested here, a claim about the derivability of an instance of schema T,
whose right-hand side expresses the actual propositional content of the truth-bearer
mentioned in the left-hand side.

14. The contention that any explication of truth along Tarskian lines will provide
substantive semantic information about the truth-bearers (which seems intuitively
correct to anybody familiar with Tarskian truth-definitions), in contrast to the claim
by Etchemendy mentioned at the beginning of Section 5, is an immediate
consequence of the view that I have been defending. Even a list-like defmition will
state, at the very least, the actual contents of the truth-bearers. Moreover, if the
explication aims to at least make it plausible that something like it could cover the
very minimum domain of the ordinary truth-concept (namely, every sentence, or
 THE EXPLANATORY VALUE OF TRUTH THEORIES 145

sentence-instantiation, which we could understand), it will provide more substantive

information about the structure of the language; this was already the case regarding
Tarski's own example in 'The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages'. This will
be information of the sort that compositionality theories aim to provide. It could
simply be an accident that a recursive defmition manages to specify the conditions
for the application of the defmed concept constituting the 'defmitional', or 'first' part
according to the present proposal in such a way as to make in fact satisfiable the
second part (the material adequacy condition). But this is not usually the case; the
feat is achieved by making explicit, at least in part, how the different subsentential
expressions semantically contribute to determine the propositional content of the
sentences in which they appear. (It should be clear that I do not claim that this is the
case for every truth-definition; this is something that has to be considered case by
case.)
The view that I have been defending thus contradicts the claims of philosophers
(call them 'minimalists') who also support disquotational ideas, and therefore should
be carefully distinguished from them. These philosophers (Paul Horwich and Hartry
Field are good examples; see Field, 1994) contend that a disquotational explication
of truth can be even less substantive than I think it is: it will not even provide the sort
of information that the semantic conception, if the preceding arguments are correct,
does provide. I think that minimalism is not a tenable view of truth. If the argument
so far developed is correct, minimalism is not even compatible with disquotational
ideas, correctly understood, and it suffers therefore from an internal inconsistency;
but I cannot develop the point in the space of this paper6. Here I just wanted to
record the distinction.
There is a related criticism by Soames that I would like to discuss in closing. He
says: "A crucial component of that question [whether a Tarskian truth definition
provides us with an adequate explication, or analysis, of truth] is the question of
whether the Tarskian defmiens is capable of doing all the legitimate theoretical work
(involving the object language) demanded of the ordinary notion of truth. But this
question would have very little substance - beyond the issue of whether the definiens
is coextensive (over the object language) with the ordinary notion - if, as maintained
by [the present proposal], every predication of the definiens carried with it the extra
information that the associated definition was materially adequate, and hence that the
defmiens applies to a sentence of L iff that sentence is true (in the ordinary sense).
[ ... ] the effect of [the present proposal] would be to trivialize the condition on
adequate analyses, or explications, that the precisely defmed predicate be capable of
serving the same explanatory purposes as the predicate being explicated" (Soames,
1997a, 84-5).
Repeating the point made in Section 10, we could reply to this that the present
proposal, by Soames' own standards, is at least able to present Tarskian definientia
in a better light as purported Camapian explications than if they are understood
according to Soames' own views; for, as I indicated earlier, his main criticism lies
precisely in the fact that Tarskian definientia cannot perform properly as
explications, on account of their lack of a proper link with meaning. More to the
146 MANUEL GARCIA-CARPINTERO

point, however, we can notice, firstly, that the definiens does not directly include,
according to the present proposal, the claim of material adequacy; it entails it,
through the inclusion of the reference to convention T and given the independent
aprioricity and necessity of instances of schema T involving the ordinary truth-
predicate. In thus making explicit the crucial disquotational element of truth, the
explication acquires explanatory value over and above the lack of substance claimed
by Soames. Moreover, there are the philosophical consequences of this fact, that
'epistemic neutrality' of truth according to the semantic conception, which we have
refrained from addressing here. Finally, there is the semantic information explicitly
provided by all those Tarskian definitions which are more than mere lists. Although
there is no space to examine either the issue, I will just say for the record that it can
plausibly be claimed that one of the theoretically most important uses to which a
Tarskian defmiens can be put, namely, its use to precisely define and to account for
the logical properties (logical truth and logical consequence) of the object language,
derives precisely from this7 .

15. The view I have been defending constitutes a partial vindication of Davidson's
claims about truth and meaning: as far as we can see, it seems reasonable to think of
a compositionality theory for a given language as having at its core a Tarskian theory
of truth for it, as he has been contending ever since his earlier pioneering work on
these issues. But, of course, it differs substantially from Davidson's philosophical
views about truth and meaning. As Davidson has indicated in several places, the
adoption of the semantic conception means that truth cannot be used to offer a
substantive philosophical account of the nature of meaning. Davidson has claimed
that truth has to be used in such an account (see also Rumfitt, 1995, for a different
argument to the same effect). Needless to say, I do not find convincing the relevant
arguments; but nothing I have said here confronts them. However, in the first section
of Davidson (1990) he joins Etchemendy and the others in the criticism of the
semantic conception I have been trying to rebut here. I can understand Davidson's
eagerness to demolish the semantic conception on the basis of Etchemendy's
criticisms (or any others); for, if the criticisms succeeded, the only viable way that
we could make sense of the deep intuition that familiar Tarskian truth-defmitions are
semantically informative would be embracing Davidson'S own philosophical views
about truth and meaning. No matter what we make of Davidson's specific arguments
against the semantic conception (which, as I just said, I have not confronted here), I
hope I have shown that no further force can accrue to them from joining Dummett,
Etchemendy, Putnam, and Soames in their own criticisms.
In summary, according to the semantic conception our implicit grasp of the truth
concept depends on an equally implicit grasp of independently comprehended
semantic properties of the truth-bearers. To explicitly characterize the concept, thus,
requires us to explicitly display that independently possessed systematic semantic
knowledge. In so doing, we cannot provide a philosophical characterization of the
crucial semantic concepts; for, if the preceding claims are correct, truth is (implicitly,
and thus in any accurate explicit characterization) defmed in terms of those semantic
 THE EXPLANATORY VALUE OF TRUTH THEORIES 147

concepts. But the characterization can indeed serve to make explicit how the
semantic properties of complexes (truth-bearers, in particular) depend on semantic
properties of their parts. And this is at least part of what semantic theories for natural
languages attempt to do. "Nothing can be simultaneously a theory and a defmition,"
says Dummett in the quotation given at the very beginning (Section 2). This is very
true. Truth-definitions embodying the semantic conception, however, are not
'definitions' in the sense that Dummett obviously presupposes in the quotation (i.e.,
stipulative abbreviations). They are theories Gustified a priori). They are theoretical
reconstructions (Camapian explications) carefully presenting the way a certain
intuitively plausible truth-concept is articulated, attempting to be as accurately
descriptive of the way our rational practices involving it show it to be in fact
articulated, as this is compatible with the overriding normative aim of producing a
precise concept which is not susceptible to pitfalls, in the form of antinomies and
other varieties of intellectual perplexity.

Universitat de Barcelona

NOTES
• I am grateful to Scott Soames for very helpful discussion on the issues raised in this paper; also to
audiences at the universities of Santiago de Compostela, Granada and Lisbon, and at the Instituto de
Investigaciones Filos6ficas de la UNAM, Mexico, where earlier versions of the material in the paper were
presented. Financial support has been provided by the DGES, Spanish Department of Education, as part
of the research Project P896-1091-C03-03.
I The clearest exposition of the argument in this form is due to Scott Soames. Although it has only
recently appeared in his published work (see, e.g., Soames, 1995), I think that credit should be given to
him, for I have seen the argument expounded in writings which antedate Etchemendy's publications on
this matter.
2 He admits this much in (Soames, I 997a).
3This paragraph elaborates (on the basis of the view advanced here) on a suggestion made to me by Greg
Ray.
4 Similar considerations are made in the initial paragraphs of (McDowell, 1987).
5 See, for instance, the quotations provided by Soames in footnotes 1 and 3 of (Soames forthcoming-b).
6 The point is elaborated in (Garcfa-Carpintero, 1998).
7 (Garcia-Carpintero, 1993 and 1996b) contain some of the elements needed for a fully-fledged
discussion of this point, although the point is not explicitly addressed in those papers.

REFERENCES
Camap, Rudolf: 1962, The Logical Foundationd ofProbability, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Davidson, Donald: 1980, 'In Defense of Convention T', in D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and
Interpretation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 65-75.
Davidson, Donald: 1990, 'The Structure and Content of Truth', Journal of Philosophy LXXXVII, 279-
327.
148 MANUEL GARCiA-CARPlNTERO

Davidson, Donald: 1996, 'The Folly ofTrying to Define Truth,' Journal ofPhilosophy XCIII, 263-278.
Dummett, M.: 1975, 'What Is a Theory of Meaning?', in S. Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 97-138.
Dummett, Michael: 1978, 'Preface', in his Truth and Other Enigmas, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard
University Press.
Dummett, Michael: 1998, 'Is the Concept of Truth Needed for Semantics?', in C. Martinez, U. Rivas and
L. Villegas-Forero (eds.), Truth in Perspective, Aldershott (England), Ashgate, pp. 37-63.
Etchemendy, John: 1988, 'Tarski on Truth and Logical Consequence', Journal of Symbolic Logic 53,
51-79.
Field, Hartry: 1972, 'Tarski's Theory of Truth',Journal ofPhilosophy LXIX, 347-375.
Field, Hartry: 1994, 'Deflationists views of Meaning and Content', Mind 103,249-285.
Garcia-Carpintero, Manuel: 1993, 'The Grounds for the Model-Theoretic Account of the Logical
Properties', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 34, 107-131.
Garcia-Carpintero, Manuel: 1996a, 'What Is a Tarskian Theory of Truth?', Philosophical Studies 82,
113-144.
Garcia-Carpintero, Manuel: 1996b, 'The Model-theoretic Argument: Another Turn of the Screw',
Erkenntnis 44, 305-316.
Garcia-Carpintero, Manuel: 1997, 'An Incorrect Understanding of Tarskian Truth Definitions:
Comments on Soames 'The Truth of Deflationism', in E. Villanueva (ed.), Philosophical Issues 8:
Truth, Atascadero (Cal.), Ridgeview, pp. 45-56.
Garcia-Carpintero, Manuel: 1998, 'A Paradox of Truth-Minimalism', in C. Martinez, U. Rivas and L.
Villegas-Forero (eds.), Truth in Perspective, A1dershott (England), Ashgate, pp. 37-63.
McDowell, John: 1987, 'In Defence of Modesty', in B. Taylor (ed.), Michael Dummett: Contributions to
Philosophy, Dordrecht (Netherlands), Martinus Nijhoff.
O'Leary-Hawthorne, John and Oppy, Graham: 1997, 'Minimalism and Truth', Noils 31,170-196.
Putnam, Hilary: 1985, 'A Comparison of Something with Something Else', New Literary History XVII,
61-79.
Rumfitt, Ian: 1995, 'Truth and Communication', Mind 104,827-862.
Soames, Scott: 1984, 'What is a Theory ofTruth?" Journal ofPhilosophy LXXXI, 411-429.
Soames, Scott: 1995, 'T-Sentences', in W. Sinnott-Armstrong, D. Raffinan and N. Asher (eds.),
Modality, Morality, and Belief, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 250-270.
Soames, Scott: 1997a, 'Reply to Garcia-Carpintero and Richard', in E. Villanueva (ed.), Philosophical
Issues 8: Truth, Atascadero (Cal.), Ridgeview, pp. 79-93.
Soames, Scott: 1997b, 'The Truth about Deflationism,' in E. Villanueva (ed.), Philosophical Issues 8:
Truth, Atascadero (Cal.), Ridgeview, pp. 1-44.
Soames, Scott: forthcoming, Understanding Truth, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Tarski, Alfred: 1936, 'The Establishment of Scientific Semantics', in A. Tarski, Logic, Semantics,
Metamathematics (1. Corcoran, ed.), Indianapolis, Hackett Pub. Co. (1983), pp. 201-208.
Tarski, Alfred: 1944, 'The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics', Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research IV, 341-376.
 VLADIMIR SVOBODA

NEGATIVE TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE*

This paper is devoted to considerations on beliefs in negative truths and the role they
have in constituting our knowledge. The considerations were originally inspired by a
defence of epistemic optimism presented by D. Davidson in his influential paper A
Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge [CTTK]'. The objective of Davidson's
argumentation in that paper was to show that "most of the beliefs in our coherent set
of beliefs are true". Reading this quantitative characterisation of epistemic optimism
I began to wonder whether the character of negative beliefs does not make the
objective (taken rather literally, disregarding much of the context of Davidsonian
epistemology) easily, nearly trivially attainable. Basically the same question can be
put radically in this form: Do beliefs in negative truths, no matter how manifold they
are, really constitute knowledge? This paper can be taken as the first step in an
inquiry which should answer this question.

1. WAYS TO SPECIFY NEGATIVE TRUTHS

The initial problem of the theme is obvious: the concepts of negative truth and
negative knowledge certainly do not belong among well-defined philosophical
concepts and it is even doubtful whether they can be provided with a satisfactory
explanation. An inquiry into the nature of these two concepts should naturally first
concentrate on the concept which seems to be less complicated - the concept of
negative truth. The questions to begin with are: Can the term 'negative truth' be
given some plausible meaning? And if yes: Does the concept of negative truth have
any philosophical significance? My conjecture is that answers to both of these
questions should be affirmative, although it is not easy to substantiate these answers
conclusively.
We can perhaps claim that the origins of the concept of negative truth can be
traced back to Aristotle, who in his Metaphysics gave the well-known two-fold
definition of what is true claiming that: ... to say of what is that it is, and of what is
not that it is not, is true .... In this quotation2, Aristotle seems to distinguish
positivity and negativity with respect to truth and in the same passage he
distinguishes also positivity and negativity with respect to falsity: to say of what it is
that it is not, or ofwhat is not that it is, is false ....
Aristotle's explanation may seem fairly unproblematic, but the way in which it
puts both positive and negative truths on the same level was in his times more tricky

149
J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), 149-161.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
150 VLADIMIR SVOBODA

than it might seem from the present point of view. Many philosophers of that time
were ready to accept the Parmenidean line of argumentation and to claim that we
cannot in fact say what is not as speaking about non-being or, more precisely,
speaking of that which is not is meaningless.
Before Aristotle, Plato dealt with this problem in his Sophist. There he strove to
explain how is it possible to speak of that which is not. His point basically is that the
relation of the non-X to the X must always be understood in terms of otherness, not
of contrariety. So saying about something that it is not X in fact does not presuppose
the existence of something which is not, but only the existence of X and the existence
of a difference. Plato tried to show that we can both think and say what is not by
showing that these utterances do have a determinate sense 3 •
Aristotle's deliberations in the part of his Metaphysics from which the above
quotation comes is kindred to Plato's line of refuting the Parmenidian attitude. From
his point of view it seems that saying that something is is in an important respect
different from saying that something is not: however, the difference is not a
difference between meaningful and meaningless utterances, but rather a difference
within the sphere of the meaningful.
But should these ideas of Aristotle's really be taken as sufficient testimony that
he outlined a distinction between positive and negative truths? In the above
mentioned quotation Aristotle speaks about saying something that it is true. So it is
perhaps more correct to claim that he distinguishes between negative and positive
true utterances, rather than to say that he distinguishes between negative and positive
truths.
This point is fair. Nevertheless, distinguishing positivity and negativity with
respect to utterances cannot be the whole story. We can easily see that the question
of distinguishing positivity and negativity arises not only in the case of utterances but
also in the case of other categories of truth-bearers such as sentences, propositions,
and beliefs.
The task of distinguishing negativity and positivity in each truth-bearer category
is certainly not easy and it is not even clear whether any correspondence between
truth-bearers of particular kinds can be found i.e., whether a putative
negative/positive classification of sentences will correspond to a suitable
negative/positive classification of propositions, utterances, or beliefs. Though we can
intuitively quite clearly tell assent from dissent, affirmation from negation,
concurrence from denial, it is not surprising that we get into trouble when we try tum
these into theoretical notions.
Anyway, if we look at all the categories of truth-bearers at once, it seems that the
concepts of negative and positive truths can be determined in a quite natural way.
We can leave the question of a correspondence among classifications open and
identify negative truths as those items of different categories of truth-bearers which
are both true and negative.
Of course this specification is not very illuminating unless we have criteria
allowing us to distinguish between positive and negative items in the case of each
category of truth-bearers. To provide such criteria is, however, a monumental and
 NEGATIVE TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 151

baffling task. I will not deal with the task in any depth here. All I wish to do is to
show how the classification of truth-bearers into positive and negative could be
approached and which are the problems that attempts at any classification of this
kind will have to face.
The frrst thing to notice is that the classification of truth-bearers into positive and
negative ones makes good sense only for some truth-bearer items. This can be shown
by a simple example from the category of truth-bearers which are easiest to handle -
sentences. Let us consider a very simple sentence like:

Socrates is a man and he is not a bird

Does this sentence say something which is true or false? If we take the quoted
characterisation by Aristotle literally, we are in trouble, because his explanation of
what is true is useless. The sentence, taken as a whole, says neither what is nor what
is not, or from the opposite view, it says both at once. So we might claim that
Aristotle does not give us any clue how to discern what is true in the case of
sentences like this one 4•
The natural response to this is that the sentence consists of two parts, the frrst of
which says what is and the second what is not: together they form a sentence which
is true but neither negative nor positive because its truth value is a function of the
values of its positive and negative constituent.
But, there are of course many more or less complicated sentences which cannot
be so easily split into parts. Let's ponder for example the three simple sentences:

John is not in Bohemia because he left for Italy

Every being which is a bird is not a man
If I had not been born in Prague, I would have been born in Vienna

The lesson is that Aristotle's definition is not designed for complex sentences,
but only, or at least primarily, for simple/atomic sentences. Such a conclusion,
however, immediately raises two new questions: Which sentences are simple or
atomic?; Is each atomic sentence either positive or negative? The answer to the
second question is obviously closely connected with the answer to the first one.
We might spend quite a lot of time striving to answer these questions. But even if
we succeeded, we would have brought our goal only a little bit nearer. The crucial
step in discerning the two sides ofthe distinction will certainly be based on exploring
our intuitions and grasping them as defmitely as possible.
In this attempt to capture our intuitions it is natural to start from sentences which
represent paradigmatic examples of negative sentences. Simple sentences starting
with the phrase it is not the case that can be taken as such typical negative
sentences5 • It is, however, quite obvious that to identify sentences of this type with
negative sentences would be too restrictive as there are many sentences which do not
start with the negating phrase and still are intuitively clearly negative. For example
the sentence:
152 VLADIMIR SVOBODA

Socrates is not a bird

which expresses exactly the same proposition as the sentence

It is not the case that Socrates is a bird.

This suggests that we might make use of our ability to decide which sentences have
the same meaning. Thus a (simple) negative sentence could be taken as a sentence
which can be paraphrased by a simple sentence starting with the phrase it is not the
case that.
Obviously, this characterisation does not represent a genuine definition of
negative sentences, but rather an attempt at giving a key to isolating, by way of
translation into a canonical form, a particular set of sentences. It is clear that in many
cases we would have to face problems arising from the fact that the meaning of a
sentence is a rather elusive entity about which there is no ultimate authority. As
examples of pairs of sentences which might give rise to a clash of intuitions, if we
were to answer the question whether they are correct paraphrases of one another, we
can ponder the following cases:

Vienna is situated outside of Bohemia

It is not the case that Vienna is situated in Bohemia

Socrates is dead
It is not the case that Socrates is alive

3 is even
It is not the case that 3 is odd

Prague has more than one million inhabitants

It is not the case that Prague has less then one million inhabitants

A very similar, but a slightly more sophisticated approach to the positive/negative

classification could be based on the notion of logical form. In the frame of this
approach we might specify positive and negative sentences by reference to their
logical form. We could for example say that positive predicative sentences are those
whose form can be correctly represented as F(ah ... an) and negative predicative
sentences are those that have the form -F(a" ... an).
This seems to be a quite clear differentiation for those who are able to use first
order logic in the logical analysis of natural language. Besides predicative sentences
of these forms, there are also other sentences of other forms which can be well
classified as negative and positive. For example it seems natural to say that the
conjunction of two or more positive sentences is also positive, and the conjunction of
negative sentences is also negative. Moreover, we can say that sentences which can
 NEGATIVE TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 153

be correctly analysed as having the logical form "ifxFx are positive (they can be taken
as fmite or infmite conjunctions Fa & Fb & .... ), while sentences of the logical form
-3xFx are negative (taken as finite or infinite conjunctions -Fa & -Fb & ....). We
might perhaps proceed further similarly. In this way we would get a trichotomic
classification of sentences into positive ones, negative ones and others.
This way of classifying sentences has to face problems similar to those faced by
the classification based on the concept of paraphrase. Nevertheless, we can
optimistically suppose that it would be the less problematic the more advanced our
competence in the logical analysis of natural language.
There is, however, one more approach which, although not very hopeful, opens a
quite interesting alternative view on the problem of the classification. The central
idea of this approach is that we should distinguish positive sentences (and other
kinds of truth-bearers) from negative ones by reference to their respective
truthmakers. If we are friends of facts and friends of negative facts in particular then
we could say that negative sentences are those which, if true, are made true by a
negative facts.
The stumbling block of this approach is that the concept of negative fact is
certainly at least as obscure as the concept of a negative sentence. It is well known
that even the most influential partisan of negative facts, Bertrand Russell, avoided
any attempts to provide a definition of these entities. Moreover, his main argument
for their existence was that we must suppose that they are because otherwise we
cannot explain what makes negative propositions true. Negative facts are certainly
enigmatic entities and nowadays hardly any philosophers think that there are
negative facts.
But we can stick with this approach even if we wish to dispense with negative
facts. We may for example suggest that positive sentences are those which, if true,
are made true by a particular truthmaker (atomic fact), while negative sentences are
those which (if true) are not made true by any particular truthmaker (atomic fact), but
instead are made true jointly by all the truthmakers (facts) that contain the individual
(or individuals) which is (are) mentioned in the sentence in question. In other words:
A true negative atomic sentence is the sentence which does not have its own fact
which makes it true but is made true by the part of the world which is relevant (in the
loose sense of containing the particular individuals) to what the sentence is about.
We may for example say that the sentence:

This window is closed

is true because the fact of this-window's-being-closed belongs to the realm of facts

of which our world consists. On the other hand the sentence

This window is not a musical instrument

is true because the set of all facts concerning this window is (in our world) such that
it contains no item like this-window's-being-a-musical-instrument6 •
154 VLADIMIR SVOBODA

This approach presupposes that we have an insight into the realm of facts and
that we can in principle distinguish which facts belong there. It also presupposes that
we are able to distinguish atomic facts from compound facts and that we have a clear
conception of the making true or correspondence relation between truthmakers and
truth-bearers. These presumptions are patently dubious. Moreover this approach
might be taken as implying that we can classify a sentence as positive or negative
only if it is true: Only then can we see the truthmaker, and only then is it clear what it
is. This is manifestly unacceptable.
We can close this debate over the specification problem by confirming what was
quite clear from the very beginning: classification of truth-bearers into positive and
negative is really a tricky matter. But it does not mean that we must give up this task.
After all there are not many philosophical concepts which are clearly defmed, and if
philosophy were bound to employ only clearly defined concepts there would be no
philosophy at all.

2. NEGATIVE TRUTHS AND EPISTEMIC OPTIMISM

Even if we suppose that the concept of negative truth (negative true sentence,
proposition, belief, utterance) was given some more or less satisfactory explanation
we still have to face the question of whether or not this concept has any
philosophical import besides the specific problems which negative truths introduce
for correspondence based theories of truth. I think that there are some aspects of
negative truths which are noteworthy from the epistemological point of view. To
somebody this might sound trivial: however, it is not easy to show what the specific
aspects are.
In attempting to identify the alleged specific epistemic features of negative truths
we can make use of the conception of epistemic optimism suggested by Davidson in
the above mentioned paper A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge [CTTK].
The optimism certainly does not amount to a refutation of all the claims traditionally
defended by sceptics. Davidson for example explicitly admits that any single belief
of ours can be false. What he promotes is the thesis that we are not completely or
largely mistaken about the world. This sounds like a very natural and understandable
thesis, but what exactly is its import? What does it mean 'not to be largely mistaken
about the world' or, in other words: what does it mean 'to be mostly right about how
things really are'? The idea of being more or less right about the world is certainly
epistemologically interesting and worth exploring. But even though it might seem at
first sight intuitively quite unproblematic, it is in fact not lucid.
Davidson himself observes some difficulties in specifying what he really means
when formulating the aim of his argument. In the following passage he offers two
different formulations:

All that a coherence theory can maintain is that most of the beliefs in a
coherent total set of beliefs are true. This way of stating the position can at
best be taken as a hint, since there is probably no useful way to count beliefs,
 NEGATIVE TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 155

and so no clear meaning to the idea that most of a person's beliefs are true. A
somewhat better way to put the point is to say there is a presumption in favor
of the truth of a belief that coheres with a significant mass of belief (CTTK
p.308).

So we have two formulations of the optimistic thesis, both of which are somewhat
problematic. The latter is, in my view, even less clear than the former as it seem
extremely difficult to say what presumption means in this context, and it is similarly
unclear which mass of beliefs is significant. (Even a partial clarification of these
issues would, it seems, have to involve some highly complicated issues from the
theories of probability, belief revision or counterfactuals.) Thus I will concentrate on
the first formulation in spite of its imperfections. After all, even though we do not
have a useful way of counting beliefs this does not seem to be excluded in principle;
and even if this pathway of specifying the optimistic view on our knowledge is blind,
as Davidson suggests, we will perhaps have a chance to see quite interesting areas
before we reach the dead end.
There is one obvious precondition of any successful attempt in counting beliefs:
we must have a suitable account of what does it mean to believe something. We can
agree that beliefs involve complex dispositions to speak and act. Saying that a person
X has a belief B if and only if her state of mind is that ofassenting to the sentence 'B'
is obviously too restrictive. We wish to say that, e.g. Neil Armstrong believes that
the Moon is round (that the sentence The Moon is round, as he understands it, is
true) although he is probably not thinking about the Moon at the present moment.
What we mean by ascribing to him the belief is something to the effect that, if he
were asked whether he believes the Moon to be round, his immediate sincere answer
would be affirmative.
Ifwe accept this very rough explanation, we can (at least provisionally) identify a
set of beliefs of X (at time moment t) with the set of (interpreted) sentences of a
language L (say English) X would assent to if asked whether he agrees with what the
particular sentence says. This dispositional definition bypasses many difficult
problems of belief-individuation and is obviously somewhat vague and sketchy, but
still, it gives us some idea of a set of beliefs ascribable to a person at a given time.
Now using many simplifications I will try to outline a theory that could be
perhaps called a quantitative theory of belief First we can identify a set of possible
beliefs of a speaker of language L (L-speaker) with the set of all descriptive
sentences of L7. (I naturally mean meaningful sentences: the idea is that a
monolingual speaker cannot believe anything unless it is expressible by a descriptive
sentence of L to which he can assent.) Let us call this set of sentences O. Having 0
we can specify its subsets in an interesting way. The first division (the one that is
obviously highly relevant) consists in distinguishing sentences according their truth
values (at some time moment t). So we can define two subsets of 0: OT - a set of all
sentences of L that are true (at t), and OF - a set of all sentences of L that are false (at
time moment t)8.
156 VLADIMIR SVOBODA

Given this division of the set of sentences of L, we can specify positions of

different believers. However, we will not start with normal believers but with divine
ones 9 • Let us consider an L-speaker who is omniscient - 0L. What does this being
believe in? The answer seems obvious: it believes (assents to) all true sentences of L
(Or) and just to them.
Now consider her 'mirror-image': someone who could be called a nihilscient
being. We can defme him as a being which does not assent to a single sentence from
Or, but assents to all the sentences from OF. This person, however, though he seems
to be a proper 'opposite' of OL is not a very interesting partner - neither for her, nor
for us. He for example assents to sentences like Some bachelors are married or All
bachelors are married and the same holds for all other sentences which are
analytically false in EnglishlO. Given what we have said about the nihilscient being it
is clear that he cannot be said to understand the language he uses. Moreover, he is
not coherent as he assents to all contradictions expressible in L.
Such a completely unintelligible being is certainly not of much interest. In fact it
seems that we misuse the term belief if we call him a believer. We are interested in
epistemic abilities of creatures that are more similar to us. So we should concentrate
on beings reasonable enough to deserve being regarded as (more or less) coherent
competent speakers (of L). The person who satisfies these conditions, but is still
confused about the world as much as possible, can be called a coherent nihilscient L
speaker - NL. We can define this being as the coherent speaker of L who assents to
as many sentences from OF as possible. To repeat: NL is a person who shares some
beliefs with the omniscient person OL but only to the extent which is necessary to
guarantee that he understands L and that he is coherent. As concerns all other issues
he disagrees with OL in each point" .
Now, quite obviously, the coherent nihilscient person is the one among us (more
or less coherent speakers of L) who is maximally mistaken about the way things in
the world are. (Remember that we are still idealising: for he is surely quite a divine
being as he is supposed to have a clear opinion concerning the truth of all the
descriptive sentences of L.) Is this person mostly right in his beliefs concerning the
world, or is he largely mistaken?
To answer this question we should ask to what extent OL and NL share their
beliefs. If most of sentences assented to by NL (i.e. most of his beliefs) are such that
OL assents to them too (they belong to Or) then we can say that the nihilscient person
is mostly (in the quantitative sense) right about the world; otherwise he is mostly
mistaken l2 . Since we do not have at our disposal any method for calculating our
beliefs (still less a method of calculating beliefs of such unusual beings) we must
speculate at this point. To make these quantitative speculations simple we can take
into account only 'tractable' sentences - let us say sentences containing less that one
hundred words. This will get us a finite number of possible sentences.
It is hardly possible to discern how large a part of the sentences of our language
is such that a competent speaker must assent to them just because of his competence.
Prima facie we cannot exclude that the number of analytic sentences of L exceeds
the number of the synthetic ones. In such a case we might conclude that a competent
 NEGATIVE TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 157

L-speaker is mostly right about the world just because of his competence. This
conclusion, however, is not convincing at all, since by assenting to analytic sentences
we manifest our knowledge of our language, not our knowledge of the world.
If we accept this, we have a reason to put analytic sentences aside while thinking
about the ratio of our true and false beliefs. The new question about the nihilscient
person's knowledge of the world then is: Do most of NL'S synthetic beliefs
correspond to what is the case? Are the majority of them true?
At fIrst sight the answer seems to be rather obvious - he is so confused that he
must be largely mistaken. But is this opinion right? Let us suppose that OL assents to
the sentence The Eiffel tower is brown. In such a case NL must disagree and believe
that the Eiffel tower is not brown. He can for example assent to a sentence The Eiffel
tower is pink instead. As he is coherent and knows that the tower, being pink all
over, cannot have (at the same time) some other colour too, he also believes that the
Eiffel tower is not red, it is not yellow, it is not green, black, orange etc. It is natural
that OL shares these negative beliefs of NL'S. This large amount of shared belief
concerning this issue can be taken as a testimony to the fact that NL is not largely
mistaken concerning the colour of the Eiffel tower. Most of his beliefs concerning this
issue are undoubtedly true and only a few of them are false. We can easily see that a
very similar result could be achieved concerning the material the tower is made of, its
height and so on.
The same applies to an enormous variety of other things of our world and their
properties. It seems quite obvious that if we accept that NL is not largely mistaken
concerning the Eiffel tower, though he thinks that it is pink, made of wood, its height
is 35 meters etc., we must accept that he is not largely mistaken about the world
either l3 . Then it is quite clear that we cannot be largely mistaken about the world as
NL'S rate of true beliefs to false beliefs is the worst one which a competent coherent
L-speaker can have. The objective of a Davidsonian epistemic optimist has been
accomplished.
This conclusion, however, is obviously suspicious. A more natural outcome of
the line of reasoning just outlined is that it is possible that even a person, the
majority of whose beliefs about the world is true can, in spite of this quantitative
success, still be regarded as substantially confused about the world. This suggests
that the quantitative criterion determining who is mostly right about the world is not
adequate and would not be very useful even if there were some useful way to count
beliefs.
This conclusion is not too surprising. The remedy for those who would still wish
to stick with this quantitative approach seems at hand: The person who is mostly
right about how things really are is the person who mostly has true positive synthetic
beliefs. It is difficult to judge whether this approach might work. One thing is clear,
however: To accept this criterion obviously amounts to giving the positive/negative
distinction with respect to truth the prominence of a central epistemic issue.
158 VLADIMIR SVOBODA

3. NEGATIVE TRUTHS VS. POSITIVE TRUTHS

Though most philosophers would certainly agree that our beliefs concerning the
world are, after all, mostly correct, they would at the same time reject the idea that
this optimistic thesis might be, even if only in principle, confirmed by numerical
comparison of our true and false beliefs. Some beliefs seem to be more and some
other less important. Relating this point to the present discussion we can guess that
many of them would suppose that the positive beliefs are more fundamental than the
negative ones. This contention might be prima facie intuitive, but until we can spell
out what makes the positive beliefs primary to the negative ones, it is nothing but a
mere speculation.
In the fmal part of this article I will try to indicate three reasons for ascribing
positive and negative true justified beliefs differing epistemological statuses. The
first reason can be called epistemological, the second logical, and the third
probabilistic.
The first reason concerns the so far omitted (but in epistemology central) concept
of justification. It can be put into the form of the following thesis: Negative beliefs
are justified not directly by an experience or evidence but indirectly (derivatively) -
their justification evolves from previously justified positive beliefs. Employing our
simple example once again: Let us suppose that we have made a conclusive
empirical inquiry into the material of the Eiffel tower, the result being that it is made
of steel. Knowing also that what is made (exclusively or mostly) of steel cannot at
the same time be made (exclusively or mostly) of wood, straw, glass, melon sugar
etc., we are (using our ability to make simple deductions) naturally led to accept
quite a large number of negative beliefs concerning the material of the tower. The
beliefs are numerous, but all depend on a single positive belief for their justification.
This seems to show that even though our negative true beliefs may have the features
normally taken to characterise knowledge they are in a sense secondary since their
justification hinges on some positive belief(s).
The example, however, illustrates only a typical situation. It would be wrong to
claim that the justification of negative beliefs is always derivative. Sometimes it is
not. We can for example imagine that somebody learns that if something is made of
gold then it can not be dissolved by aqua regia. Such a person can take a bottle of
aqua regia and use the content to see whether or not the material of Eiffel tower is
dissolved by it. The positive result of the experiment can then serve as a direct
justification for a true belief that the tower is not made of gold. The person knows
what the tower is not made of, but she does not know what it is made of: she accepts
a negative belief which was justified directly, not derivatively14. As we can see, it
would be wrong to generally say that the negative beliefs are justified indirectly. Still
it seems that the observation that negative beliefs we have are typically or mostly
justified indirectly is important for understanding the different roles which positive
and negative beliefs play in our knowledge.
The epistemological reason is closely connected with the reason I propose to call
logical. In the example with the material of the Eiffel tower we saw how 'productive'
 NEGATIVE TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 159

a positive belief can be as concerns the number of its logical consequences, if we

make use of the truths which may be called analytic or conceptual. These truths
about our language intertwine elementary sentences into a net of logical
dependencies. Observing these dependencies led Wittgenstein to reject the atomistic
picture of language which he had endorsed in his Tractatus 15 • As Strawson pointed
out, each predicate has a certain range of incompatibilities 16. While negative
predicates are typically compatible with many other predicates (they have only a few
incompatibilities, if any), their positive counterparts tend to have a wider range of
incompatibilities. The exclusion of the possibility of ascribing the incompatible
predicate to a thing amounts to ascribing the respective negative predicate to the
thing.
We would be certainly wrong if we claimed that each positive sentence has more
incompatibilities than its negative counterpart. Nevertheless we can quite
convincingly show that typically they do, while the opposite situation is extremely
rare. So we may assume that the alleged difference between positive sentences and
their negative counterparts in terms of their cognitive value can also be
comprehended in terms of their different inferential capacities.
Here we touch the third reason why negative true beliefs are cognitively
secondary with respect to positive ones. The probabilistic reason concerns a prima
facie verisimilitude of different sentences. What do I mean by verisimilitude here? I
certainly do not mean the logical probability of a particular sentence being true. If
we take any pair of claims expressed by an atomic sentence and its negation then (on
assumption that the law of the excluded middle holds) the logical probability of the
particular sentences being true is 0.5 for each of the two sentences. The claim I wish
to advance is that in the case of the vast majority of pairs formed by a positive
sentence and its negative counterpart we are likely to be right in saying that the
positive one is false while the negative one is true. Take for example mathematical
calculations like the following pair of sentences:

x + y equalsz
x + y does not equal z

If x, y and z stand for randomly chosen natural numbers than it is obvious that the
probability of the first sentence's being true is close to zero while the probability of
the second one's being true is close to one. In the case of empirical sentences the
difference is not so massive and depends on the character of the particular sentence,
but speaking generally we can say that negative empirical sentences are much more
likely to be true than their positive counterparts. To illustrate this we can compare
e.g. the following pair of sentences where a stands for any material object:

a is a book
a is not a book
160 VLADIMIR SVOBODA

Using Popperian terms we can say that negative sentences normally do not
represents hypotheses bold enough to be very interesting 17. Their cognitive content is
typically much lower than that of their positive counterparts.
Again also here are some exceptions. Take for example the pair of sentences:

a is made of known elements

a is not made of known elements

In this case it is obviously much more likely that the positive sentence is true while
the negative one represents an extremely bold (and in most cases easily falsifiable)
hypothesis.
So again, we can see a reason why negative sentences (beliefs) may be said to
playa secondary role in our knowledge. But as previously we have not shown that
any negative belief is less valuable or cognitively interesting than its positive
counterpart. It is rather a statistical matter that in most cases the positive members of
the couple are cognitively predominant.

How should one conclude these general considerations on the nature of negative
truths and negative beliefs? First it seems that the argument involving the nihilscient
L-speaker shows that even if we do not have at our disposal any method of counting
beliefs, we still have good reason to suppose that most of our beliefs are negative,
and that most of them are true. Thus we are naturally led to the conclusion that
(quantitatively speaking) most of our knowledge of the world (if we have any) is
negative knowledge i.e. knowledge consisting of true, justified, negative beliefs.
On the other hand, it is quite obvious that even though our negative beliefs
probably surpass the positive ones numerically, they generally form the less
important (but not completely neglectable) constituent of our knowledge. Weare
more often right in believing what is not the case than in believing what is the case,
but the latter beliefs tend be of more worth. Our rather sketchily suggested
epistemological, logical and probabilistic reasons perhaps offer some hints of how
the phenomenon might be grasped, but they represent just first steps towards
explaining the complex issue concerning the role of negative truths in our
knowledge.

Academy o/Sciences o/the Czech Republic

NOTES

• Work on this paper was supported by the Grant Agency of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech
Republic, grant no. A0009704.
I D. Davidson: 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge'. In: Truth and Interpretation. E.Lepore
(ed.), Blackwell, 1986.
 NEGATIVE TRUTH AND KNOWLEDGE 161

2Aristotle Metaphysics, Book /v/7, The Complete Works of Aristotle, J.Bames (ed.), Princeton
University Press, 1984.

3 c.f. E.G. Lee, 'Plato on negation', Philosophical Review, 1972, p. 273.

4 To be more faithful to Aristotle's way of putting things we should rather speak about utterances.
Nevertheless we will neglect the difference in the course of the present considerations.
5 By a simple sentence we can understand a meaningful concatenation of a subject and a predicate - a
sentence expressing an elementary statement.

6 c.f. Kolal's paper in this volume.

7 The question whether a person can also assent to an imperative sentence (or to a question) is quite
interesting and it is related to the problem of whether imperatives (questions) can have any truth value.
But examining this issue would lead us far beyond the scope of our present topic. So when speaking of
sentences ofL I will mean indicative sentences.

8 We could also define the set of all sentences that lack truth value, but for the present moment we can
ignore possible sentences of this type as their existence is inessential from the point of view of our
simplified argument.
9 This is inspired by the Davidson's paper, where the idea of an omniscient interpreter plays central role.

IO I do not wish to introduce here the question of whether or not the very analytic/synthetic distinction is
tenable. We could equally well avoid these often attacked terms and speak for example about conceptual
truths and falsities and not change much in this context.
II In fact it is not precise to speak about the coherent nihil scient L-speaker as we surely can imagine
many coherent nihilscient beings each with a different set of beliefs.
12 These deliberations are naturally very sketchy as they sharply distinguish sentences into two
categories, true and false, and disregard verisimilitude of particular sentences. In our schema, thus, both
the sentence 'The Eiffel tower is 332m high' and the sentence 'The Eiffel tower is 35m high' are false
and the fact that the first is nearly true while the second is really false is disregarded. Tichy's criticism of
Popper's definitions of verisimilitude shows how counterintuitive the consequences of such
simplification can be. (C.f. 'On Popper's Definitions of Verisimilitude', British Journal for the
Philosophy of SCience, 25, 1974.)
13 Here, of course, a question arises of whether NL's beliefs just mentioned can really be taken as beliefs
concerning the (real) Eiffel tower. This question certainly calls for an answer but the problems involved
are too complex to be dealt with in this paper.

14 For a different defence of cognitive independence of negative beliefs c.f. G.Bhattacharya Essays in
Analytical philosophy, Sanskrit pustak bhandar, Calcutta, 1989, p.44 ff.

15 While in Tractatus Wittgenstein advanced the atomistic position. C.f. e.g. 4.7.11 "It is a sign of an
elementary proposition, that no elementary proposition can contradict it", in his later works he changed
his views: "The mutual exclusion of unanalysable statements of degree contradicts an opinion which was
published by me several years ago and which necessitated that atomic propositions could not exclude one
another" (Some Remarks on Logical Form in Essays on Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I.M.Copi, R.W.Berd,
eds., Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, p.35).

16 P.F. Strawson Introduction to Logical Theory, London, 1952, p.8.

17 Naturally boldness is a 'positive' feature only to some extent. Hypotheses which are so bold that their
falsification is a matter of course are not of much interest.
 PAUL HORWICH

DEFLATIONARY TRUTH, ABOUTNESS AND

MEANING*

This paper concerns the relationship between three concepts: namely, truth,
aboutness and meaning, The general idea is to show how a certain philosophical
view of truth - known as deflationism - helps to dissolve a certain problem
regarding aboutness - the notorious problem of intentionality - and thereby puts us
in a good position to discern the nature of meaning. So there will be three questions
on the table. First: what is truth? What is the characteristic shared by 'Snow is
white', 'Electrons are negatively charged', and other true propositions? Second: how
can a word - a mere sound or mark - be about, or represent, a certain aspect of
external reality? How is it possible for the word 'Plato', that I might use here and
now, to reach out through space and time and latch on to a particular person living a
long time ago and a long way away? And third: which underlying, non-semantic
property of a word provides it which the particular meaning it has? What is it about
different words - 'dog', 'and', 'good', and so on - that is responsible for their
meaning what they do and is the basis for our translating them as we do into foreign
languages? Addressing these questions in turn, I will proceed in three stages. First I
will say what I think is the essence of the deflationary perspective on truth, outlining
the evidence in favor of adopting it. Second I will show, from that perspective, how
the problem of aboutness should be approached and dissolved. And third I will
indicate how this view of the problem opens the door to a certain account of
meaning: the so-called 'use theory'.
The basic thesis of deflationism, as I see it, is that the equivalence schema

The proposition that p is true iff p

is conceptually fundamental!. By this I mean that we accept its instances2 in the
absence of supporting argument: more specifically, without deriving them from any
reductive premise of the form

For every x: x is true = x is F

which characterizes traditional ('inflationary') accounts of truth, such as the

correspondence theory (x is true = x corresponds to a fact), the coherence theory (x is
true = x belongs to a coherent system of beliefs), the verificationist theory (x is true =

163
J Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (ifany), 163-171.
© 1999 Paul Horwich.
164 PAUL HORWICH

x would be verified in ideal circumstances), and the pragmatist theory (x is true = x is

useful to believe). The evidence for this basic thesis is that our overall deployment of
the truth predicate - the sum of everything we do with the word 'true' - is best
explained by taking the fundamental fact about its use to be our inclination to accept
the instances of the equivalence schema3 . And the evidence for this explanatory
claim is that that regularity is necessary and sufficient to account for the value of our
concept of truth: its utility as a device of generalization.
Let me elaborate. Deflationism about truth is partially inspired by Wittgenstein's
caution against the temptation to overdraw linguistic analogies. Just because most of
the predicates we encounter ('red', 'bachelor', 'table', etc.) are used for
categorization and explanation on the basis of shared characteristics - so that it is
reasonable, in each such case, to look for some answer, however crude, to the
question of what is the underlying nature of the property for which it stands - we
should not assume that all predicates function in this way. In particular we should
not assume that the truth predicate does. But what in that case could its function
posssibly be?
A neat answer was first proposed by Quine, who observed that the truth predicate
plays a vital role in enabling us to capture certain generalizations4 • For we can
generalize

The moon is subject to gravity

by saying

Every physical object is subject to gravity.

And similarly we can always obtain a generalization from a statement about a

particular object by replacing the term referring to the object with a (possibly
restricted) universal quantifier: thus, 'a is H' becomes 'Every G is H'. However there
is a important class of generalization that cannot be constructed in anything like this
way: for example, the one whose instances include

(a) If dogs bark, then we should believe that dogs bark

(b) If God exists, then we should believe that God exists
(c) If killing is wrong, then we should believe that killing is wrong.

In this case, and in various others, the usual strategy doesn't work. How then can the
generalization be formed?
Quine's suggestion was that it is in order to solve this problem that we have the
concept of truth. More specifically, what is needed is that there be a term 'K' - in
English, the word 'true' - governed by the schema

The proposition that pis K ifJp.

 DEFLATIONARY TRUTH, ABOUTNESS AND MEANING 165

For in the light of its instances we can convert our original list, (a), (b), (c), etc., into
an equivalent one

If the proposition that dogs bark is true, then we should believe that dogs bark
Ifthe proposition that God exists is true, then we should believe that God exists
If the proposition that killing is wrong is true, then we should believe that killing
is wrong

in which the same property (namely, 'If x is true, then we should believe x') is
attributed to objects of a certain type (namely, propositions). So this second list can
be generalized in the standard way, as

Every proposition is such that, if it is true, then we should believe it

or, more colloquially

We should believe the truth5•

The deflationist's contention (which is founded on a survey oflinguistic usage) is

that whenever we deploy the concept of truth non-trivially - whether in logic,
ordinary language, science, or philosophy - it is playing this role: a device of
generalization. Moreover, its doing so requires, as we have just seen, no more and no
less than the equivalence schema. Thus the basis for our use of the truth predicate is
indeed our acceptance of the instances of that schema, and not any principle of the
form

For every x: x is true = x is F.

This core deflationary position has, I would argue, certain additional, distinctive
implications about truth: flrst, regarding the meaning of the truth-predicate (namely,
that 'true' is implicitly defined by the equivalence schema6); and second, regarding
the underlying nature of the property of truth (namely, that it almost certainly
doesn't have one\ But my concern here is neither with these more-or-Iess debatable
consequences nor with how they might be derived. What I want to do, rather, is to
examine the bearing of the core deflationary position on questions about the
possiblity of aboutness and the nature of meaning. How is it possible for a word to
represent (refer to, be about) some speciflc aspect of the world? And in virtue of
which of its underlying, non-semantic properties does a word come to have the
particular meaning that it has? The answers that I want to propose come directly
from the above-argued, basic tenet of deflationism - that the equivalence schema
grounds our use of the truth-predicate - and don't depend on what I think that tenet
implies about the meaning of 'true' and the underlying nature of truth.
Clearly the issues of aboutness and meaning are intimately related to one another.
For words derive their referential character from their meanings: e.g. any word
166 PAUL HORWICH

meaning DOG is about dogs. Therefore the problem of aboutness may be rephrased
as the question: what property constituting the meaning of a word could possibly
account for its reference? Or, to put it another way, what constraint on the nature of
meaning is implied by the fact that the meaning of a term determines its referent?
Evidently we must be able to answer this question in order to be in a position to say
what kinds of property constitute meanings.
The relevance of deflationism to these matters should be fairly obvious. For, as
we have just said, one of the main difficulties in determining the nature of meaning
has been the need to account for aboutness, i.e. representation, i.e. the fact that
words refer to features of reality and that sentences can express objective truths. But
to the extent that reference and truth are 'deflated' it is surely going to be easier to
show how they are possible, and hence easier to devise a theory of meaning that can
accommodate the representational power oflanguage.
This presupposes, of course, that deflationism regarding the truth of propositions
goes hand in hand with deflationism regarding the relations of being true of (holding
between predicative concepts and sequences of objects) and reference (holding
between singular concepts and objects). But this is very plausible. For not only are
the pertinent considerations parallel to one another, but the three truth-theoretic
notions are interdefinable. I will take it, therefore, that the conceptually fundamental
principle governing our use of 'is true of is the schema

(y)(Predicative concept F is true ofy ifffY)

rather than anything even roughly of the form

(x)(y)(x is true ofy iffRxy)

and that the conceptually fundamental principle which explains our use of 'refers' is

(y)(Singular concept N refers to y iffn=y)

rather than any principle or principles of the form

(x)(y)(x refers to y iffCxy).

Let me be more concrete about the line of thought I am recommending - from

deflationary truth to the analysis of meaning via a dissolution of the problem of
aboutness. Consider the English word 'dog'. Which of its non-semantic properties (if
any) is responsible for its having the particular meaning it has? Or to put it another
way, which property Ux satisfies the reductive theory

x means DOG = Ux.

 DEFLATIONARY TRUTH, ABOUTNESS AND MEANING 167

Now, as I just said, it has been typically felt that the main difficulty in answering this
question derives from the fact that the meaning of a predicate determines what it may
correctly be applied to: in particular that

x means DOG ~ x means something that is true of all and only dogs.

Or in other words - if we suppose, by definition, that an utterance is true iff the

proposition it expresses is true - the difficulty derives from the fact that

x means DOG ~ x is true of all and only dogs.

For it is taken for granted that this meaning-to-truth conditional places a very severe
constraint on what Ux might be8 • But this presupposition, I want to suggest, stems
from a misguided inflationism about truth-theoretic notions.
To see this, remember that from an inflationary point of view the basic principle
governing 'x is true of y' is not the equivalence schema but some conceptually more
fundamental thesis. And notice that, depending on what that more fundamental thesis
is taken to be, only certain reductive analyses of the meaning-property (Le. only
certain choices of Ux) will be compatible with the meaning-to-truth conditional. For
example, given the common inflationary assumption that 'x is true of y' must reduce
to some non-semantic relation, 'x bears R to y', we have

x is true of all and only dogs = (y){Rxy ~ Y is a dog).

But then, in order for the meaning-to-truth conditional to hold, the property, Ux, to
which the meaning-property reduces, would have to imply the property to which the
aboutness-property reduces: it would have to be that

Ux ~ (y){Rxy ~ y is a dog).

And this could be so only if

Ux = Sx & (y){Rxy ~ y is a dog).

Thus from the usual inflationary point of view the representational, referential power
of the word 'dog' imposes a substantive, relational constraint on what sort of
property might constitute its meaning.
However from a deflationary perspective the situation is quite different. For quite
independently ofwhat Ux might turn out to be, the meaning-to-truth conditional

x means DOG ~ x is true of all and only dogs

is trivially entailed by the equivalence schema (together with the defmition of 'true'
for utterences in terms of 'true' for propositions). Therefore, if {as deflationism
168 PAUL HORWICH

dictates) we presuppose nothing about the nature of 'x is true of y' except those
principles, then our need to accommodate the meaning-to-truth conditional can
impose no constraint whatsoever on our choice of Ux. In particular, there will be no
need for the property in virtue of which 'dog' possesses its particular meaning to be
some sort of relation between that word and dogs. To put it another way: there can
be no problematic conflict, in and of themselves, between the meaning-to-truth
conditional and any theory of the form 'x means DOG = Ux'; but there can be a
conflict between them given a further (inflationary) assumption of the form 'x is true
of y = Rxy'; therefore deflationism does not enable the problem of aboutness to arise.
If this point of view is unrecognized then, given how difficult - perhaps
impossible - it is to meet the constraint implied by inflationism, a likely outcome is a
form of scepticism about meaning. A case in point is Kripke9, who has reasoned in
effect that since the problem of aboutness is insoluble, there can be no 'genuine'
facts about the meanings of words. More specifically, what Kripke has argued is that
we cannot find underlying, non-semantic properties, Ux, Vx, Wx, ... , etc., of the
words, 'dog', 'electron', 'table', ... , etc., which will satisfy the conditions

Ux~ (y)(R'xy ~ y is a dog)

Vx ~ (y)(R"xy ~ y is an electron)
Wx ~ (y)(R"'xy ~ Y is a table)

where the 'Rxy' relations take something like the form 'There is a disposition to
apply x to y in ideal conditions 1'. And on this basis he concludes that meaning
properties have no underlying natures. But, as we have seen, this sort of constraint
on a theory of meaning is motivated by an inflationary view of truth (whereby the
meaning-to-truth conditionals must square with a prior analysis of the 'true of'
relation). Only from that point of view can it be argued that the property that
constitutes the meaning of a predicate must entail a property of the form '(y)(Rxy ~
Fx)'.
Thus, as deflationists about truth, we should not be insisting upon an account of
predicate-meaning along the lines of

x means F = Sx & (y)(Rxy ~ :ty)

(where S and R might somewhat depend on 'f'). Nor, in that case, is there any reason
to expect an account of the more general form

x means F = T(x,f)

(where T might depend on 'f'). And this conclusion is quite liberating; for most of
the theories of meaning in the literature have been crammed into one of these molds
and consequently don't work very well. Consider, for example:
 DEFLATIONARY TRUTH, ABOUTNESS AND MEANING 169

x means F = (y)(A tokening of x would, in apppropriate circumstances, be caused

bYYByis f)

which, in different versions, has been proposed by Fodor, Stampe and others; or

x means F = the function of x is to indicate the presence of fs

suggested, in one form or another, by Dretske, Papineau, Millikan, and JacoblO. The
morals of the present discussion are: fIrst, that the phenomenon of aboutnesss
(representation, error, intentionality) does not provide a rationale for demanding
such a theory; second, that the contrary assumption can stem from a misguided
inflationism about truth; and third, that theories designed to accord with it are
unsurprisingly unsuccessful.
The alternative, which becomes available and plausible once inflationism has
been left behind, is to allow that

x means DOG = Ux
x means ELECTRON = Vx
x means TABLE = Wx

where the non-semantic, meaning-constituting properties, Ux, Vx, Wx, ... may be
non-relational- it is not assumed that, in order to mean F, a word must stand in some
relation or other to fs. Nonetheless it is quite possible, as we have seen, to
accommodate the phenomenon of aboutness, the determination of extension by
meaning.
The deflationary view of truth suggests that the truth of the proposition that snow
is white consists in nothing more than snow being white, that the truth of the
proposition that killing is wrong consists in killing being wrong, ... , and so on -
which implies that nothing in general constitutes the property of being true. And, as I
have been arguing, this should lead us to acknowledge the possibility that 'x means
DOG' consists in something or other, 'x means ELECTRON' consists in something
else, ... , and so on - but that there is no general account of the structure, 'x means F'.
I call such a view of meaning, 'deflationary', both because it is parallel to, and
because it is justified by, the deflationary view of truth.
A use theory of meaning would have this deflationary character - for example,
the theory that each word's meaning is constituted by there being a certain
explanatorily basic regularity governing its overall deployment. For the basic use-
regularities of different words - like different laws of nature - need not relate the
words they govern to the members of their extensions. If I had more space I would
go further into the reasons I believe that this is the right direction in which to look
for the nature of meaning. I would show how various familiar objections to the use
theory can be turned aside - e.g. its non-normativity, its alleged implication of
holism, and its alleged incompatibility with compositionality. And I would show how
the primary constraint on a decent theory of meaning is very naturally satisfied - i.e.
170 PAUL HORWICH

the need to accommodate the explanatory relationship between the meaning of a

word and the ways in which we use itll.
Not having done these things I can't pretend to have made much of a case
for the use theory of meaning. But I do hope to have motivated it to some degree.
My argument, in a nutshell, was that insofar as the conceptually fundamental
principle about truth is the equivalence schema - as it very plausibly is - then there
is no reason to suppose that what constitutes the meaning of a predicate is some sort
of naturalistic relation to the members of its extension; hence no reason to insist that
'x means F' reduce to something of the form 'T(x,t)'; hence no reason, when all such
theories prove inadequate, to have to swallow the obscurities of anti-reductionism or
non-factualism. A fair alternative. is to embrace a more flexible, non-relational
conception - one which is nonetheless naturalistic and nonetheless consonant with
representation - namely, the use theory of meaning.

University College London

NOTES
• This paper is a slightly modified version of Chapter 4 of my book Meaning (Oxford University Press,
(998).

I The deflationary view of truth is articulated and defended in my Truth (Blackwell, (990), 2nd Edition
(Oxford University Press, (998). Arguably the truth predicate is ambiguous: standing most often for a
property of propositions, but sometimes for a corresponding property of utterences. In this paper I am
using it in the first of these senses, and I use the underlined word 'true' in the second sense: that is, to
mean 'expresses a true proposition'.
2 The instances of the equivalence schema that must be accepted by an English speaker, S, are obtained
by replacing 'p' (on the LHS of the material biconditional) with a declarative utterence of S's, and
replacing 'p' (on the RHS) with another instance of that utterence-type - one which expresses the same
proposition.
3 I am assuming that linguistic behaviour is the product of a combination of facts and general principles,
including an interlocking set of fundamental regularities governing the use of particular words (i.e.
governing the acceptance of sentences containing them.)
4 See W. V. Quine, Philosophy ofLogic, Prentice Hall, 1970.
5 It was perhaps an exaggeration to have suggested that the concept of truth is needed for this purpose.
An alternative strategy would be to introduce substitutional quantification, by means of which one could
articulate the desired generalization by saying '(P)(Ifp, then we should believe thatp)'. But in that case
there would be required a battery of extra syntactic and semantic rules to govern the new type of
quantifier. Therefore, we might consider the value of our concept of truth to be that it provides, not the
only way, but a relatively 'cheap' way of obtaining the problematic generalizations - the way actually
chosen in natural language.
6 Insofar as the source of our overall use of the truth predicate is our disposition to accept instances of the
equivalence schema, then, given a use theory of meaning (which, I am suggesting, is partially motivated
by the overall argument of this paper), it follows that the meaning of the truth predicate is fixed by that
fact about it.
 DEFLATIONARY TRUTH, ABOUTNESS AND MEANING 171

7 The argument that truth does not have an underlying nature is based on two ideas (which can in turn be
justified). First, the familiar facts about truth can all be explained on the basis of a theory whose axioms
are instances of the equivalence schema (i.e. axioms such as 'The proposition that snow is white is true
iff snow is white'). And second, no theory from which this set of equivalence facts could itself be
deduced, would be simple enough to qualify as an explanation of them. For a defence of these claims, see
Truth, 2nd edition, op. cit., Chapter 3.

8 For the sake of simplicity the present discussion is restricted to predicates whose extensions are context-
invariant. In a more general treatment the appropriate conditional would be something like
x expresses the propositional constituent <F> ~ x is true of Fs

and it would be supposed that the propositional constituent expressed by a word is determined by a
combination of its meaning and the context in which it appears. Therefore, even in this more general
case, the extension of a predicate is determined, at least in part, by its meaning, and so the
representational power of a word might seem to constrain how its meaning is constituted.
9 See S. Kripke, Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language, Blackwell, Oxford, 1982 (pp. 25-27). I
elaborate the present critique of Kripke's argument in 'Meaning, Use and Truth' (Mind, April 1995) and
in Meaning (op. cit.).
10 See Dretske, F.r. Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1981.
Stampe, D.W. 'Toward a Causal Theory of Linguistic Representation', Midwest Studies In Philosophy
Vo1.2. Fodor, 1. Psychosemantics, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1987. Papineau, D. Reality and
Representation, Oxford, B1ackwel\, 1987. MilIikan, R. Language, Thought and Other Biological
Categories, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1984. Jacob, P. What Minds Can Do, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1997.
II See my Meaning (op. cit.) for a discussion of these issues.
 JERRY SELIGMAN

THE SUBSTANCE OF DEFLATION·

According to contemporary folklore, the debate between realists and anti-realists has
undergone several transformations. First, zealous advocates engaged in passionate
disputes. Sincere idealists fought honest realists with the enthusiasm of those who
expect imminent victory. Then, battle-weary, they opted for the seemingly gentler
activity of 'characterizing the debate'. Predictably, the fight over how to characterize
the debate soon became as hot, if not hotter, and less clearly delineated. Famously,
Dummett championed the idea that truth is an essential component and that bivalence
is the hallmark of realism. Others disputed the import of bivalence, but truth was
never far from the fray.
More recently, philosophers have been drawn to deflationism as a way of
quelling the secondary debate (about the debate between realism and anti-realism).
Truth, they say, has nothing to do with it. The truth predicate is a simple
'disquotational device' that we use for reasons of economy and expressive
convenience and has no metaphysical implications whatsoever. A historian of ideas
should have foreseen the next step: the debate has been transformed into its tertiary
form, between deflationism and its antithesis, sometimes called 'substantivism'.
In this paper I will argue that we have come full circle, and that the current
debate between deflationists and their opponents is usefully viewed as a
reincarnation of an old and familiar debate about realism in the philosophy of
science. If I am right there is no easy way out: the status of deflationism is itself a
substantial matter, and the metaphysics of truth is no easier that the truth about
metaphysics.

I. TWO THEORIES

When Stephen Hawking announces the demise of science to the world (before the
end of the millennium?) he may tell us that the theory of everything is something to
do with manifolds in a 24-dimensional space. From the mathematical equations
governing these unimaginable entities we - or at least he - can derive the other
fundamental theories of General Relativity and Quantum Theory as limiting cases,
and make intricate predictions about their interaction with just-conceivably testable
consequence about the radiation coming from black holes (if there are any black
holes).
Although unhesitatingly impressed, we may have lingering doubts about the
theory, whose details will almost certainly remain beyond our comprehension. Have

173
J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (ifany), 173-186.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
174 JERRY SELIGMAN

Hawking and his colleagues discovered new and fundamental parts of the world or
just a very clever way of talking about the everyday realm of quarks and spacetime?
Fast forward to the end of the next millennium. A thousand years of research by
philosophers and linguists has finally revealed the nature of linguistic meaning. Just
as with the theory of those 24-dimensional manifolds, we need not concern ourselves
with the details here. Naturally, the theory uses various theoretical predicates, which
are unlikely to be directly translatable into contemporary scientific English because
they can only be properly understood by someone with a mastery of the theory.
Among the consequences of the theory are the following:

(I) 'Zhang xiasheng de qiche Riben hilo' is T if and only if Mr Zhang's car is
Japanese.

(2) 'Zhang xiasheng mei you yIliang Riben qiche' is T if and only if Mr Zhang
does not have a Japanese car.

(3) If 'Zhang xiasheng de qiche shi Riben hilO' is T then 'Zhang xiasheng mei
you yIliang Riben qiche' is not T.

(4) 'Zhang xiasheng de qiche shi Riben huo. Zhang xiasheng mei you yIliang
Riben qiche' is a contradiction.

Again we are impressed, and again we may be uncertain about the nature of the
result. Unable to understand the details, we are still keen to be told about the general
nature of T. What sort of property is it? Are sentences T because of certain
conventionally established correspondences with extra-linguistic reality? How are
ascriptions of T related to our dispositions to affirm the sentences to which T is
ascribed, and how is this related to their role in human communication? If two
people disagree about whether or not a sentence is T, what are they disagreeing
about?
Both millenial theories introduce technical terms whose meanings mayor may
not resemble the meanings of terms in our present scientific language, and I will
argue (in Section 3) that they should be evaluated similarly on both scientific and
philosophical grounds. In each case, we may ask metaphysical questions. Does our
acceptance of the theory commit us to the existence of the objects and properties that
it describes? Are those objects and properties fundamental ingredients of the world,
or are they constructions of some kind? There is little doubt that none of these
questions would be easy to answer, and familiar philosophical considerations would
come into play.
One set of answers results from the instrumentalist's claim that theoretical terms
should not be taken seriously. They are merely devices that are useful for expressing
generalizations and facilitating inferences, but one should not think of them as
describing parts of the real world. This is of course a form of anti-realism. In the
case of Quantum Gravity it would be anti-realism about super-strings or whatnot, and
 THE SUBSTANCE OF DEFLAnON 175

in the case of the millenial theory of linguistic meaning, it would be anti-realism

about T. In both cases, the assessment of the argument is far from trivial and would
involve the sort of substantial philosophy that detlationists are keen to avoid.
Yet, I will argue (in Section 4) that detlationism, considered as a thesis about the
triviality of truth and other semantic predicates, is no more than instrumentalism in
semantics. If this is so, then the detlationists' claim to have reached their conclusion
without any substantial philosophy, in a way that transcends the traditional debate, is
puzzling. In Sections 5 and 6 I examine specific detlationist strategies and try to fmd
the rug under which the philosophical dirt has been swept.
First, I must overcome the problems involved in discussing a theory that is only
conjectured to exists in one thousand years. These are not only temporal in nature,
and I sympathise with the reader who is silently complaining that hypothetical
theories that are characterised only as solutions to unsolved problems are not worth
the paper they are not written on. The purpose of invoking such a theory is to avoid
any detailed discussion of the nature of meaning and truth (if any), which could not
fail to be prejudicial in the present context. I want the reader to consider it alongside
a scientific theory whose details are also unknown. I claim that the philosophical
debate over the nature of properties to which the two theories may refer are
isomorphic, and equally difficult to settle.
Of course, the widespread disagreement about the form of a theory of meaning
makes it pointless to speculate about specific evaluative criteria, but we may still
seek criteria that would apply to any such theory, assuming only that it has been
developed successfully. In the next section, I will identify a criterion of this kind.
Perhaps the best way to regard the following discussion of the millenial theory is as a
long existential elimination: if a successful semantic theory existed, what properties
would it have? I must therefore acknowledge that much of what I say is of little
significance to those who would deny the possibility of a successful semantic theory.
Happily, my main target here is the detlationist, who not only thinks that a successful
semantic theory exists, but also that it is essentially trivial!.

2. WHY MEANING WANTS LOGIC AND NEEDS TRUTH TO GET IT

I have assumed that the millenial theory of linguistic meaning makes use of a
theoretical predicate T which plays many of the roles assumed by the English
predicate 'is true'. In this section I will try to justify this assumption. What I need to
establish is that any successful theory of meaning is bound to make use of use of
theoretical terms, like T, which are sufficiently close in meaning to the familiar
semantic predicates as to make debate about the nature of T essentially the same as
the debate about truth. My characterization of detlationism as a form of semantic
anti-realism hangs on this: if it is possible to develop a theory of meaning that does
not use anything like the truth predicate, then it would be possible to hold both that
truth is trivial and that meaning is not.
An initial problem is that we have little if any idea about the content of the
millenial theory of meaning - certainly less of an idea than Hawking has about the
176 JERRY SELIGMAN

similarly nonexistent Unified Theory of Quantum Cosmology. Moreover, a survey of

contemporary views reveals widespread disagreement about almost every aspect of
linguistic meaning, from core technical issues concerning compositionality and
logical form to wider concerns about the relationship between linguistic meaning,
human psychology, and linguistic behaviour.
Yet the very possibility of disagreement presupposes some common ground,
some shared problems to be solved, and at least some overlap in what would count as
a satisfactory solution. For theories of linguistic meaning, the common ground is
logic. A theory of meaning for Chinese that did not entail (4) would not be worth
waiting another thousand years for. A failure to account for the logical conflict
between a sentence and its negation would be a serious defect which could not be
excused, no matter how well the theory fared in providing explanations of linguistic
behaviour. This much, I hope, can be agreed2•
Logic has a central place in semantics because logical relations between
linguistic expressions are analytic - determined entirely by the meaning of the
related expressions. If there are logical laws, then an adequate theory of meaning
must account for them. If it did not, then one would have to conclude that there are
no logical laws, or that they are determined by something other than linguistic
meaning, and I am happy to assume henceforth that both alternatives are
unacceptable.
Logical relationships between sentences, such as consistency, entailment and
contradiction, are usually explained in terms of their semantic properties, such as the
reference of names and predicates, and the truth of component sentences. Unless our
understanding of logic is hopelessly wrong, there is no reason to doubt that the form
ofthese explanations will remain the same in the millenial theory, even ifno mention
is made of truth and reference. For this reason, I'll continue to use the symbol 'T' in
place of the truth predicate, allowing (pace Tarski) that the interpretation of this
symbol may not be fixed until further details of the theory become known to us. With
this in mind, a simple example of an explanation of a logical relationship between
sentences is as follows: (4) because (3) is entailed by the theory of meaning alone. In
other words, the two Chinese sentences are contradictory because the millenial
theory entails that one is T if and only if the other is not T. Similarly, explanations of
entailments would appeal to T-preservation: if by considering the meaning of the
sentences alone, it can be shown that the property of being T is preserved from
premises to conclusion, then the argument is logically valid.
We should expect the millenial theory to give us explanations of logical laws by
T-preservation without having any idea about the nature of the T-predicate itself. For
a present-day example, consider the the a first-order object language with (meta-
linguistic) T interpreted in the usual Tarskian way. The laws of classical logic for the
object language may be justified as those that preserve T. But if instead T is
interpreted as 'has a canonical proof (in the system NJ), then the laws of
intuitionistic logic will be justified3• Those who have different accounts of the nature
of T may therefore disagree about which logical laws are justified, but only because
 THE SUBSTANCE OF DEFLATION 177

they agree on the use of T-preservation as the correct criterion for evaluating logical
laws.
It is important to emphasise that it is the admissibility of aT-predicate that is
significant, not the hypothsised use of it in the millenial theory. The millenial theory
may be couched in quite different terms, but if it is to explain logical laws must allow
the interpretation of aT-predicate. It may be objected that the above explanations of
logical relations in terms of the distribution of T are upsidedown, and that a theory of
meaning could take logical relations as primitive, or as explained in psychological or
social terms. In this case, the way in which T is distributed over sentences would be
constrained by the logical relationships between those sentences, rather than the
other way around. Even so, talk of T-preservation would make sense because of what
we already know about the form of logical laws, and it would still be possible to ask
how T is distributed and why. If the answer is that the distribution of T depends on
primitive logical relations, or on their explanatory base, then the substantial debate
about the nature of truth would shift to one about the nature of logic, but would not
be eliminated.
There is a relevant technical result. Tarski has shown that logical laws are
determined by T-preservation if and only if they satisfy various structural conditions:
Permutation, Contraction, Weakening, Identity, and Cut4. More precisely, Tarski
showed that if logical inference obeys these principles then there is a property of
sentences, which we may as well call T, and that the valid inferences are those that
preserve T. We may call such systems of inference Tarskian. Most formalisations of
logic traditionally considered by philosophers are Tarskian, but it is a matter of
debate as to whether all of logic can be regimented so as to obey all of the structural
conditions. The two main challenges come from considerations of defeasibiIity,
which arises in many areas of philosophy, and a number of issues in the semantics of
natural languages concerning inter-sentential relations such as anaphora. I will
consider briefly each of these in term.
Defeasible reasoning - reasoning to a conclusion that may be defeated by further
evidence - does not satisfy Weakening, but is ubiquitous in both scientific and
practical contexts. If defeasible reasoning is taken to be valid, then validity is not
Tarskian, and so cannot be characterised in terms of T-preservation. Yet this does
not settle the case against the utility of T. Even if defeasible reasoning is accepted as
logically valid, further work must be done to show that no part of logic is Tarskian.
Typically, formalisations of defeasible reasoning will include classical, non-
defeasible reasoning as a special case, to which the notion of T -preservation applies.
Non-formal approaches to defeasibility based on reasoning by analogy are also
usually presented as augmenting classical reasoning rather than replacing it. The case
against T-preservation would only be served by a thoroughly revisionist approach,
according to which the usual logical laws are overthrown in favour of a strictly non-
Tarskian alternative.
The detailed analysis of the semantics of natural languages has also revealed non-
Tarskian patterns of reasoning. The analyses of anaphora, quantification, and ellipsis
have all benefited from the use of dynamic logics, in which various structural
178 JERRY SELIGMAN

principles fails. The basic idea of dynamic logic is that the semantic value of a
sentence is not a truth-value but an action. Typically, the action is a movement in a
'space' of epistemic states, such as the change in state of a person's knowledge when
the person accept the statement. A conclusion C is a logical consequence of premises
PI and P2 if the result of performing the actions corresponding to PI and P 2, in that
order, always results in a state in which C is accepted. Consider the follow
arguments.

(5) A man is walking in the park. He is whistling. Therefore, a man is walking in

the park and whistling.
(6) David is sitting by the window. He is whistling. He looks across the road. A
man is walking in the park. Therefore, a man is walking in the park and
whistling.

In dynamic logic the first argument is valid and the second invalid, and this seems to
agree with most people's pre-theoretic judgements. But the premises of the first
argument are also premises of the second argument (in a different order), and both
arguments have the same conclusions. This indicates a breach of Weakening or
Permutation, or both.
We must conclude that the patterns of reasoning considered above are non-
Tarskian and so pose a threat to the role of T-preservation in an account of their
validity. Yet, once again, the danger is easily avoided. The inter-sentential relations
motivating the use of dynamic logic are usually fairly short-ranged, and so one can
divide a long text into chunks that are large enough to ensure that there are none of
the problematic links between chunks. If one takes Tarski's structural conditions to
apply to these mutually independant chunks - or even to whole texts - then they will
be satisfied, and so the chunks mays be taken as the subject of aT-predicate, with T-
preservation playing its usual role6•
What I hope to have established in this section is that the millenial theory of
linguistic meaning (or any other successful theory of meaning) must account for
logical laws, and that to do so it is very likely to admit a theoretical term T with
many of the formal properties of the truth predicate, especially the property that T-
preservation is a mark of logical validity, at least as a first approximation. I have not
claimed that the T-predicate of the millenial theory must have the same content as
our ordinary concept of truth, but I have suggested that by inquiring into the nature
of T that we will be faced with the substantial philosophical questions that have
characterized the debate about the nature of truth.

3. TRUTH AS A THEORETICAL CONCEPT

If we are to accept either of the millenial theories as good science, it should possess
the virtues that we have come to expect of scientific theories. It should account for
significant patterns in the relevant data, and allow space for counterexamples; it
should play an active role in prediction, explanation, and other forms of hypothetical
 THE SUBSTANCE OF DEFLAnON 179

reasoning; it should be compatible with other accepted theories, interacting with

them in a fruitful way; and - most important for present purposes - it should be
simple to state. These marks of good science are widely accepted, and so I shall not
argue for their merits here.
The metaphysical significance of each millenial theory increases in proportion to
its scientific merits. The better the theory, the more likely it is to be telling us about
the nature (if any) of the real world7 • Thus if we take the two millenial theories as
scientific theories and evaluate them accordingly, we may hope to learn something
about the nature of space and time, and of T.
In claiming that the T -predicate of the millenial theory is to be regarded as a
theoretical predicate and evaluated accordingly, I do not wish to imply that our
present concept of truth is a theoretical one, best evaluated in accordance with
scientific methodology. It is clearly not in this category, if only because there is no
consensus about which theory of truth should be evaluated. Nonetheless, we can
identify various features of our present conception of truth that are directly
analogous to the theoretical concepts of other scientific theories.
Firstly, the truth-value of a sentence is not to be obtained by direct observation of
sentences. We may conjecture that a given sentence is true or false, but no amount of
looking at it will confirm or disconfirm our hypothesis.
Secondly, the truth-condition of a sentence of a natural language is a contingent
matter, to be discovered by experimentation - usually the lengthy experiment of
learning a language.
Thirdly, the truth-value of a given sentence may be vastly underdetermined by
the data. General logical considerations may dictate that the sentence has a truth-
value, but we may be unable to fmd out what it is.
Fourthly, the concept of truth participates in many important law-like
generalizations, especially those related to logical and analytic truths (discussed
above). There are also generalizations about the reliability of sources of knowledge.
For example,

(7) most things written in Nature are true.

Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, the history of semantic theory shows how our
informal concept of truth can be sharpened, disambiguated, and extended to account
for a range of linguistic phenomena. In these modifications, we can see the familiar
story of a concept that is adopted by specialists and then adapted to their special
needs.
All these properties are shared by other theoretical concepts of science.
The relevant differences between semantics and cosmology are methodological.
The lack of consensus over the general form of a theory of meaning must be
contrasted with the widespread agreement on methodology in theoretical physics.
There is also a difference in the way in which hypotheses are tested. Astronomical
observations and experiments with high-energy particles provide the physicist with a
rich and detailed stock of data. Semantics, on the other hand, rests on the less-than-
180 JERRY SELIGMAN

fIrm ground of grammaticality judgments and speakers' intuitions about logical

consequence.
These differences must be taken into account in any detailed metaphysical
discussion, but neither difference gives us a clear reason for prejudging the debate in
the case of semantics. If the reality of theoretical entities in cosmology is a difficult
matter to sort out, then it is likely to be equally difficult in semantics. Besides, the
difference between semantics and cosmology is of a similar kind to differences
between other sciences. The experimential basis of different scientifIc disciplines are
diverse: the facts relevant to the testing of a biological hypothesis about the function
of dominance orders in preditors are very different from those used to test a physical
hypothesis about high-energy particle collisions. It is also common for new scientifIc
fIelds to be characterised by a muddle of conflicting views about what kind of theory
needs to be developed, and which experimental techniques are appropriate.
I therefore propose that we take truth to be a theoretical concept, defIned by the
role it plays in the theory of meaning, and cease the pretense of distinguishing
between the predicates T and 'is true'. If there is anything remaining of the pre-
theoretic concept of truth, I am happy to leave it out on the grounds that it will not
effect my characterization of deflationism, which is my main concern in this paper.

4. DEFLATIONISM AND ANTI-REALISM

The view I have just sketched of truth as a theoretical concept in the science of
semantics, is very close to Davidson's8. He combines it with the claim that truth is
indefInable, a primitive property just like mass and spacetime curvature.
Clearly there is room to disagree about the latter claim, while agreeing with the
fIrst. After all, the primitiveness of a theoretical concept can change with the times.
When Quantum Gravity is developed, mass and spacetime curvature might not be
such good candidates. Other theoretical concepts, such as chemical valence, have
long since been usurped by the fIner grained concepts used to characterize molecular
structure. Similarly, we may fInd that the detailed structure of logical laws requires a
more subtle semantic concept.
Science is in a constant flux concerning which concepts are primitive and which
are derived. If I am right about the basic methodology for evaluating theories of
meaning, we should expect the status of the concept of truth to be similarly
inconstant and to depend on the details of our current best theory - assuming of
course that there is no straightforward strategy for eliminating it from the start.
This brings us to the issue of realism. When we think of truth as a theoretical
concept, we may ask if our theory of truth (semantics) reveals the structure of the
world as it is, independent of our semantical investigations, or if it is merely an
artifact of the way in which we think about the world. Is the truth-value ofa sentence
fixed by our social practices in a way that is independent of our knowledge of those
practices, or is the fixation of truth-values epistemically constrained? These
questions are typical of the debate concerning scientifIc realism. We may answer in a
way that supports a realist attitude to truth: it is a property of sentences that holds or
 THE SUBSTANCE OF DEFLATION 181

fails to hold independently of our knowledge. Or we may answer in a way that

undermines the independence of truth and knowledge, so supporting an anti-realist
attitude. Either way, the debate is likely to be as hot and as muddled as the debate
about scientific realism9 •
Seen in this light, detlationism is revealed as a species of anti-realism concerning
the concept of truth, akin to anti-realism in the philosophy of science. Specifically, it
is a form of instrumentalism.
The instrumentalist about 24-dimensional manifolds in the theory of Quantum
Gravity holds that, unlike electrons and comets, these manifolds are not genuine
aspects of the natural world. They are merely mathematical devices used as part of
the deductive machinery for obtaining predictions and evaluating explanations of a
quantum-gravitational ilk. Some instrumentalists will deny that these manifolds exist
at all; others will be more generous and allow their existence, as abstractions, so long
as it is regarded in the proper way: as a matter of logical convenience, defined by its
theoretical role.
Likewise, the instrumentalist about truth holds that, unlike grammaticality and
intonational structure, truth is not a genuine property of sentences. It is a formal
device used as part of the deductive machinery for obtaining predictions and
evaluating explanations concerning inference patterns and other aspects of language
use. Some instrumentalists about truth will hold that truth is not a property at all;
others will be more generous, allowing it this logical status. Both kinds prefer to talk
of definitions, rather than theories.

5. HORWICH'S MINIMAL THEORIES

Paul Horwich does not take the traditional deflationist line of denying that truth is a
property, but he still thinks that no substantial issue in philosophy needs to be
resolved when accounting for truth. He is sympathetic with the basic motivation for
deflationism: one should be able to explain truth without doing any philosophical
work.
The reason for Horwich's optimism is that he thinks that he has a very simple
theory of truth, which he calls the Minimal Theory. His position therefore depends
only on the adequacy of this theory as a theory of truth, which he defends at length in
his book, Truth.
My evaluation of Horwich's position is complicated by the fact that he
equivocates between two versions of the Minimal Theory which he takes to be
equivalent. The first of these, the Disquotational Theory, is given by the familiar
schema:

(8) 'p' is true iff p.

At first sight, the Disquotational Theory looks simple, true and complete. In fact, it
has none of these properties. There are well-known problems with the treatment of
self-referential sentences, indexical and other pathologies, showing that the theory as
182 JERRY SELIGMAN

stated is false. To repair the theory, Horwich restricts the choice of sentences to be
inserted as values for p in the schema. There is no clear way to do this, as extensive
research on the Liar Paradox has shown. Instead, he must simply stipulate that only
'non-pathological' sentences are allowed.
Thus modified, we may wonder about completeness. Earlier, I claimed that the
main purpose of a theory of truth was to formulate generalizations that can serve to
justify logical laws. None of these is a consequence of the Disquotational Theory,
which is complete only over the fmite Boolean closure of non-pathological truth-
ascriptions of the form: 'p' is true.
Finally: simplicity. There is no accepted definition of the simplicity of a theory,
but a rough comparison may be made by looking at the time-complexity of the
problem of recognizing an arbitrary string of symbols as an axiom. On this measure,
the complexity of a theory presented as a finite schema is no more than the
complexity of the set of expressions that may be inserted into the schema. By 'the
complexity of a set of expressions' I mean the time taken to compute whether an
arbitrary string of letters is a member of the set, as a function of the length of the
string. The complexity of a schema into which arbitrary sentences of our language
may be substituted is thus quite 10w lO • But the Disquotational Theory is not given by
such a schema. There are many pathological sentences, such as the Liar, which must
be excluded as substitution-instances on pain of contradiction. To evaluate the
complexity of the Disquotational Theory we must look at the set of non-pathological
sentences of our language. This set has a much higher complexity than the set of all
sentences of the language. Indeed, Vann McGee has shown that it is not even
recursively enumerable 11.
Another approach to simplicity is based on algorithmic complexity. The
complexity of a theory is taken to be the length of the smallest program on a fixed
universal Turing machine that will generate its theorems. Once again, McGee's result
shows that the Disquotational Theory is right off the scale, in contrast to the
relatively low complexity of any theory presented as a schema with unrestricted
substitutions.
A further inadequacy is that the Disquotational Theory only applies to sentences
of English (or whichever language is used to state it), and so lacks scope and
generality. Horwich's suggestion for fixing this problem is to take the Disquotational
Theory as stated to be a partial theory, which can be extended simply by acquiring
more languages. The bilingual speaker of English and Chinese could formulate a
more extensive Disquotational Theory than a monolingual English speaker. Yet the
limitation of the Disquotational Theory to sentences of a particular language is not
just a matter of scope. Even for sentences of the home language, it fails to account
for relevant counterfactuals. For example, in a bilingual English-Chinese version of
the Disquotational Theory we would not be able to conclude that

(9) if fax machines were called 'qiche' then 'Zhang xiasheng mei yOu yIliang
Rib!n qiche' would be true iff Mr Zhang does not have a Japanese fax
machine.
 THE SUBSTANCE OF DEFLATION 183

The Disquotational Theory therefore fails on almost every reasonable criterion.

Taken literally, it is false, and it can only be repaired by increasing the complexity of
the theory to an absurd degree. Even when the repairs have been carried out, the
theory misses the most important generalizations, and has nothing to say about
counterfactual possibilities.
In his book, Horwich avoids some of these problems by focusing on the second
version of the Minimal Theory, given by the schema:

(10) the proposition that p is true iffp.

I'll call this the Equivalence Theory. It is important to note that the Equivalence
Theory says nothing about the truth-values of sentences, and so it cannot serve the
role required of it by our millenial theory without the help of a principle relating the
truth of sentences to the truth of propositions. Such is provided by the schema

(11)S is true iff the proposition expressed by S is true.

Horwich's strategy is to divide and conquer. First, he claims that the Equivalence
Theory provides a simple but adequate theory of truth for propositions, and that it
carries no significant philosophical baggage. Then he claims that he can provide a
theory of meaning, supplying theorems of the form of (11), without using the concept
of truth. I'll examine each of these claims in tum.
First note that the Equivalence Theory is just as complex as the Disquotational
Theory, for the same reason. It does not suffer the limitation of a home language, but
only because language is not mentioned at all. Similarly, the problem with
counterfactuals disappears because propositions do not require interpretation to
attain truth.
Nonetheless, there is a severe limitation to the theory. If we ask of an arbitrary
proposition M, what the Equivalence Theory tells us about its truth-condition, the
answer is nothing at all. The problem is that for there to be any consequence about
M, it must be identified by a definite description of the form 'the proposition that p'.
In other words, we must have something of the form:

(12) M is the proposition that p

Although it may be argued that for every proposition M there is some truth of this
form, it is not given by the Equivalence Theory. Not only does the theory fail to
entail such bridging principles, but it give no clue as to how they should be obtained.
For comparison, imagine a theory of gravitation which yields theorems about objects
with the mass of my right shoe without any generalizations concerning objects of
mass m, nor any way of determining whether or not the mass of my right shoe and
the mass ofmy left shoe are the same.
184 JERRY SELIGMAN

This point is of crucial importance when evaluating the second part of Horwich's
strategy. He needs a theory that entails a truth of the form

(13) S expresses the proposition that p,

for each sentence S, and that does not make use of the concept of truth or any other
semantic concept.
We should consider what is involved in providing such a theory. The obvious
deflationist move of taking all instances of the schema:

(14) 'p' expresses the proposition thatp

fails for the same reasons as the Disquotational Theory. Horwich suggests that what
is required is a theory of meaning based on conditions of use, instead of truth-
conditions, thus avoiding the looming circularity. He says that the question of
whether a sentence S expresses the proposition that p depends on whether 'p' is a
good translation of S in English and hopes for an account of 'good translation' based
on conditions of use that does not employ truth or related semantic concepts.
Whatever the fate of this proposal, it is clear that the project of working out the
details would be a substantial one. Since the very same project lies behind various
unabashedly anti-realist proposals, whose details have so far proved intractable, it is
difficult to see how Horwich is gaining the merits of theft over honest toil that are so
attractive to the deflationist.

6. THE NATURE OF TRUTH

So what, then, is truth? Truth is a property that sentences may have, and which is
distributed among them in a way that is partly systematic. The patterns of correlation
between truth and linguistic structure may be exploited by language users to reason
abstractly and communicate with each other in an efficient way. The study of the
most general of these patterns is called logic, and any successful theory of language
use must explain in detail how the logical properties of sentences are determined. It
is likely that in stretching the concept of truth to fit the demands of the theory, it
will be sharpened and transformed into something that may lack some of
its pre-theoretic properties. Perhaps truth is only an approximation of a more
sophisticated concept that will eventually replace it. In any case, the lack of maturity
in the systematic study of linguistic meaning prevents a satisfactory answer to the
ancient question, even in general outline, and all the substantial issues remain. There
is a sense in which truth is a concept that we cannot fully understand, just as heat was
a concept that was not fully understood before the kinetic theory of gases, and will
never again be fully understood so long as thermodynamics is a living subject.
Concepts that are tied to a growing body of knowledge can never
be fully comprehended, and the more this is recognized, the less interest there is in
pinning them down. Instead, the freedom of the concept, once perceived, is a license
 THE SUBSTANCE OF DEFLATION 185

to the imagination; by interpreting the truth predicate in new ways we may

hope to gain insight into the way in which logical structure may possibly be
determined, and this will help us discover how it is determined.

National Chung Cheng University at Taiwan

NOTES

• I am grateful to the National Science Council of the Republic of China on Taiwan for supporting
research on this paper and for funding travel to Prague for the symposium on the Nature of Truth (if Any)
in September 1996. Thanks also to laroslav Pergrin, both for his organisation of the symposium, and for
his helpful comments on my paper.

I The key proponent and clearest expositor of this combination of views is Paul Horwich in his book
Truth (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1990) and in his contribution to this volume. I will address Horwich's
position directly in Section 6 of this paper. Deflationism is exciting because of its promise of
philosophical life free from the headaches of metaphysical debate about realism. A philosopher who
considers that debate to be irrelevant merely to the theory of truth, while acknowledging its significance
for the theory of meaning is not advancing a view which undermines the debate, and so lacks the
advertised punch of the deflationist.
2 The relationship between logic and meaning that I am claiming here is considerably weaker than that
which Michael Dummett has argued for in, for example, The logical basis of metaphysics (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). He maintains that substantial disagreements in the philosophy of
language and metaphysics are rooted in disagreements about logical laws. For Dummett, logic serves
both as the common ground and as the battlefield.
3 Dummett, 'The philosophical basis of intuitionistic logic' .

4 Permutation states that the validity of an argument is independent of the order of its premises;
Contraction states that premises may be used as many times as one cares in the course of a valid
argument; Weakening states that a valid argument remains valid on the addition of extra premises;
Identity is the triviality that a sentences entails itself; and Cut expresses the transitivity of valid argument
- if the conclusion of a valid argument is a premise of another valid argument, then the conclusion of the
latter is entailed by the combined premises of the two arguments minus the intermediate conclusion.
SA useful survey of modern developments in dynamic logic is the article Dynamics by Muskens, van
Benthem, and Visser in the Handbook of Logic and Language, North Holland, 1997.

6 An alternative strategy for saving T-preservation in dynamic logic is to re-interpret the T-predicate as
applying to a sentence if and only if it the action associated with the sentence does not change the current
state. Under this definition, not all T-preserving arguments are dynamically valid, but all dynamically
valid arguments are T-preserving. Whether the content of such a T-predicate is similar to our ordinary
concept of truth depends largely on the interpretation of 'state' and 'action' underlying dynamic semantics,
which rests on substantial issues of the kind the deflationist would want to avoid.

7 In saying the better theory is of greater metaphysical significance, I do not wish to come down on the
side of the realist. My point is only that if there are two theories and one has better scientific credentials,
then the better theory is the one on which the philosophical debate should focus. It may still be open to a
philosopher to argue that the theory is to be understood in an anti-realist fashion.
8 For example, Davidson, D. 1990, 'The structure and content of truth,' Journal of Philosophy, 87, 6:
279-328, and 1996, 'The folly of trying to define truth,' Journal of Philosophy, 93, 6: 263-278.
186 JERRY SELIGMAN

9 It is interesting to wonder if the debate about the reality of truth, as a property of sentences of a given
discourse, is any different from the debate about realism for the discourse itself. Dummett's proposal that
we take bivalence as a mark of realism, indicates that he regards them to be the same; but it is
notoriously difficult to fit certain traditional forms of anti-realism, such as phenomenalism, into this
mould. One could argue that a phenomenalist theory of meaning would result in realism about the truth-
value of a sentence like 'the chair is under the table', combined with anti-realism about tables and chairs.
10 For example, if English is generated by a context-free grammar, then the time taken to check whether
or not a string of letters is an English sentence is only polynomial in the length of the string.
II McGee, V. 1992: 'Maximal consistent sets of instances of Tarski's schema (T)', Journal of
Philosophical Logic, 21, 235-241. Perhaps the fallacy that a set of sentences has at least as high a
complexity as any subset is responsible for the illusion of simplicity of the Disquotational Theory.
 EDO PIVCEVIC

DOES THE STRATEGY OF AUSTERITY

WORK?

In what follows I shall draw freely on the so-called 'deflationary' arguments about
truth I The focus in such arguments is on truth predicates, and the general aim is to
show that such predicates are inessential either because they do not supply any
information that cannot be conveyed by simply asserting the proposition, or
propositions, concerned, or because the function they perform in the context in
which they are actually used can be performed more effectively by other predicates,
or by expressions which strictly are not 'predicative' at all; or else, if such predicates
are not altogether dispensable, that their function nevertheless does not go beyond
signalling the existence of certain purely inferential relationships between certain
proposition; and so forth. I do not propose to engage specifically with any of these
views. Rather I shall make free use of their arguments to sketch out what I shall call
the 'strategy of austerity' in the theory of truth. This strategy basically unfolds in
three main steps, and its overall aim is to establish that an account of truth does not
require a consideration of issues that transcend the boundaries of logic.
The first step involves an attempt to show that truth predicates are used mainly
for reasons of emphasis and can normally be dispensed with, although contextually
they may have a useful metalinguistic function (to be explained presently). The
second step is to argue that even if truth predicates stood for genuine properties, such
properties are sui generis, and could not be compared with 'natural' properties like
'red', 'brittle', 'magnetic', and such like, which under specifiable conditions can be
significantly ascribed to certain independently identifiable objects or substances.
Finally, the third stage involves the claim that truth is an essentially simple notion,
and that any attempt to provide an account of it in other than purely formal logical
terms rests on a misunderstanding.

THE SO-CALLED EQUIVALENCE SCHEMA AND THE 'REDUNDANCY'

ARGUMENT
The philosophical implications of this, as might be expected, are far-reaching. Thus
it follows that an account of truth does not demand that we engage with topics such
as justification of belief, verification, theory of reference, the conditions of
objectivity, and so on. Such topics, it is claimed, whilst important in their own right,

187
J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (ifany), 187-201.
© J999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
188 EDO PIVCEVIC

do not themselves contribute anything to a defmition of truth. All the essential

information about truth can be derived from the axiomatic 'equivalence schema', viz.

The proposition that p is true if, and only if, p

In this schema, the predicate 'is true' has one role, and one role only, viz. to
effect a switch from the proposition as mentioned to the proposition as used, in such
a way that the equivalence of the expressions flanking the logical operator (i.e. the
biconditional 'if, and only if') remains preserved. There is then no question here of
ascribing the 'property' of truth in the way in which properties are usually ascribed
to ontological items. The assertion of equivalence alone belies any suggestion to the
contrary. If truth predicates could be said to convey properties, then it is only in a
strictly technical intra-linguistic sense, i.e. in so far as they may be used to signal the
possibility of certain inferences from one level of discourse to another. But, then,
contextually useful though such predicates might be, why should they be logically
necessary?
The view that they are logically dispensable, as is well known, goes back to
Frege who, taking a leaf out of Kant's own trenchant criticism of existence as
predicate, argued along the following lines. If truth were a 'real' predicate, then an
attribution of truth would modify the content of the relevant sentence; but clearly
such an attribution does not add to, or take away anything from what the sentence
actually expresses. The thought that 5 is a prime number is true contains no more
than is expressed by the sentence '5 is a prime number'. Or in Frege's own words:
"The truth claim arises in each case from the form of the declarative sentence, and
when the latter lacks its usual force, e.g. in the mouth of an actor upon the stage,
even the sentence 'The thought that 5 is a prime number is true' contains only a
thought, and indeed the same thought as the simple '5 is a prime number' .,,2
In short, all that can or needs to be communicated about the truth of a sentence
can, under normal conditions, be communicated by a straightforward assertion. The
conclusion to which Frege is finally led is that the truth-value of a sentence can only
be its reference, and hence that the relation of the sentence to its truth-value is
analogous to that between a name and a thing named. In other words, truth and
falsehood are not property-like, but are rather a kind of objects; and he accordingly
calls them the true and the false, respectively.
Having previously implicitly committed himself to a categorial division of reality
into objects and properties, Frege indeed had little choice but to take the above view.
If truth and falsehood are not properties, what else conceivably might they be but
objects? There are no other possibilities available. However such an interpretation is
fraught with problems, and is hardly one that readily commends itself. Thus a
corollary of Frege's 'theory' is that all true sentences should be uniformly regarded
as having the same reference, and similarly for false ones. The problem however is
that this tends to throw into confusion the notion of reference. Consider what is at
stake here. The idea put forward is that all sentences with the same truth value are
extensionally equivalent. But clearly not all such sentences are 'extensionally
 DOES THE STRATEGY OF AUSTERITY WORK? 189

equivalent' under the same conditions. Some are entirely unrelated to each other,
some are logically linked and inter-dependent, and some are as a matter of fact
targeted at the same states of affairs in virtue of the co-referentiality of their terms.
Take the last of these. Are we to say that they have two kinds of reference, viz. the
relevant truth value and the state of affairs concerned, and hence that they are doubly
co-extensional? Now of course there is a familiar 'weak' sense of implication in
which all sentences with the same truth value might be said to imply each other. But
the question is, why should this commit us to the view of truth as an object? How can
two sentences which report logically independent facts nevertheless have the same
'reference'? They can both be true, of course. But if they are true, one might argue,
then it is simply because they convey certain existing states of affairs, not because
they 'refer' to the same truth value.
But while Frege's reification of the two truth-values has found few adherents, his
criticism of truth predicates - very much like Kant's criticism of existence predicates
- has inspired a large following. Nevertheless the main problem that this criticism
raises, namely what to put in place of the discredited property theory of truth,
remains unresolved. For once the idea of truth as an (ontological) property has been
set aside, the question immediately arises, how do we decide what true propositions
have in common? This question cannot be brushed aside; but, as we shall see, it is
futile to expect those who pursue the strategy of austerity (whilst at the same time
rejecting the Fregean 'solution', involving the treatment of truth values as objects) to
provide anything approaching a satisfactory answer.

WHAT EXACTLY DOES THE EQUIVALENCE SCHEMA SAY?

Consider now the equivalence schema referred to above, viz. 'The proposition that p
is true if, and only if, p'; or, in an abbreviated form, using angled brackets as a
nominalizing device, and taking '<p>' accordingly as a shorthand for the singular
term 'The proposition that p' (i.e. a metalinguistic name ofp):

<p> is true iff(= if, and only it) p

There are at least two problems about this schema that cast doubts about its
usefulness as a vehicle of a 'redundancy' argument. The first has to do with its
possible generalisation, the other with the meaning of the biconditional. Taken as it
stands, the schema represents just an empty matrix with variables, and strictly it is
not unless and until it is generalised that it amounts to something of a theory. But an
attempt to generalise it by binding its variables in a universally quantified
proposition, viz.

(p) <p> is true iffp

immediately gives rise to difficulties. The reason for this is quite simple: whereas on
the left-hand side of the biconditional the proposition is named, on the right-hand
190 EDO PIVCEVIC

side it is used to assert a fact. In other words, the topic talked about in the fonner
case is the proposition itself, whereas in the latter case what is being talked about is a
fragment of the world, and it is not altogether clear what kind of item is being
'quantified over', i.e. what the generalisation is supposed to be about.
But let us for the sake of the argument assume that the generalisation is about
propositions. This clearly will not remove the difficulty, for we shall still have to
settle the problem of the criteria for deciding, in any given instance, what kind of
substitutions may be appropriately made for the respective occurrences of 'p' in the
schema, given that propositions (represented by p) and names of propositions
(represented by <p» may involve very different kinds of expressions. I shall return
to this in a moment.
Alternatively, we might abandon any attempt to use the schema as a vehicle for a
general 'redundancy argument', and rather than forging out of it a general theoretical
proposition about truth by making use of the device of quantification, accept it for
what it is: an empty schema - not so much a theory as a syntactical matrix, allowing
of a construction of an infinite number of individual axioms, each of which provides
an account (as well as 'justifying' the use) of the truth predicate for just the
proposition concerned, and no other3. This seems much the most liberal solution, as
well as being the least troublesome. In fact, it is vacuous and unhelpful, for in
consequence we would end up with an infinite number of instances of the
equivalence schema, and no general theory to explain what such instances have in
common; apart, of course, from the fact that all of them are the result of substitutions
into the same schema; which is precisely what cries out for a clarification.
The difficulty with the schema is that it is not immediately clear how its
biconditional (i.e. 'if, and only if) should be interpreted. At first blush, the schema
seems perfectly transparent, almost trite. But on closer inspection it can be seen that
it is in fact highly ambiguous, in as much as it is susceptible to two different
readings, depending upon whether it is taken in what I shall call the 'extensional' or
the 'intensional' sense; with considerable implications for the concept of truth.
On the 'extensional' reading, the biconditional expresses a material equivalence
of the two sides in the schema, meaning that the expression '<p> is true' is as a
matter of contingent fact true whenever 'p' is, and vice versa; or (since the same
applies if they are false) that the left-hand side and the right-hand side of the
biconditional always agree in respect of their truth value, though not as a matter of
semantic necessity; and hence - to employ that much overworked but handy tenn of
modal logic - not necessarily 'in all possible worlds'. This reading of the schema
may seem strange, but it is not strange if the substitution for the variable 'p' is
confined to sentences of a specific language, or a specific type of language, for what
applies to a particular language, or a type of language, need not apply universally.
But quite apart from this, as we saw earlier, the two expressions flanking the
equivalence sign are about two different things: the expression on the left-hand side
says something about the proposition in question, whereas the expression on the
right-hand side says something about the world. How, then, can the two sides mean
the same? And if they do not mean the same, then the question is, why should they
 DOES THE STRATEGY OF AUSTERITY WORK? 191

be necessarily rather than merely coincidentally coextensive? It thus appears, on the

face of it at least, that the equivalence that the schema conveys can only be a
'material' or contingent equivalence.
However, from the point of view of the. 'redundancy theory', this clearly is
insufficient. Indeed the 'extensional' reading of the schema seems to make nonsense
of the whole idea of 'redundancy' of truth predicates, for given such a reading we
would have to continue employing such predicates, if only in order to make clear just
what the equivalence is about in any given instance. So this interpretation manifestly
won't do, and must be rejected.
Consider now what I have called the 'intensional' reading of the schema. The
'intensional' reading presupposes a much closer relationship between the two sides
of the biconditional, in that the expressions '<p> is true' and 'p' are now treated not
just as materially but semantically equivalent, i.e. as literally meaning the same.
The situation is now radically different. Semantic equivalence entails material
equivalence, but not vice versa. Most importantly, on the 'intensional' reading it
follows automatically that the predicate 'is true' is dispensable. For if the predicate
contributes nothing of substance to what is expressed by 'p' itself, then there is no
need for the predicate. If all the facts about the world can be expressed without
employing the word 'true', then clearly there is no rational basis for holding on to the
view that truth represents some kind of irreducible metaphysical property. All of
which goes to show (or so it would appear) that the equivalence schema, on the
present reading at least, says all there is to be said about truth, and hence that there is
no need for any elaborate exploration of the conditions of the applicability of the
predicate in order to elucidate its 'meaning'. The concept of truth is essentially a
simple, non-puzzling, trivially transparent concept that requires no 'theory'.
Note that an interpretation of truth as a 'natural' property is disallowed by either
reading of the schema. Nevertheless the difference between the two readings is that
whereas the 'intensional' reading rules out all interpretation of truth as an irreducible
property of certain (linguistic) entities, the 'extensional' reading, as we saw earlier,
seems to leave room for the view that there might be some useful work to do for the
predicate 'true'; or, at the very least, it leaves the question of its ultimate
eliminability open. It follows that the redundancy thesis, if it is going to work at all,
requires an intensional reading of the equivalence schema.

TWO INTERPRETATIONS OF SEMANTIC EQUIVALENCE

Yet what justification is there for supposing that the two sides of the biconditional
are not just coextensional but are semantically equivalent, i.e. mean the same? There
are two ways in which one might try to provide such a justification: one involves a
specific interpretation of propositions, which I shall outline presently, and the other
involves appealing to the concept of assertion.
Consider the first approach. One might take the view that propositions are such
as automatically carry a determinate truth value; i.e. that they are intrinsically true or
intrinsically false, or else don't qualify as propositions. If this is granted, then
192 EDO PIVCEVIC

evidently to say of a given proposition that it is 'true', if it is true, does not involve
ascribing to it a property that it conceivably might not possess. 'p is true' is
equivalent with 'p', and 'p is false' with 'not-p'. Moreover the truth value is intrinsic
to the proposition in such a way that the proposition cannot forfeit it, or acquire a
different truth value without in effect becoming a different proposition. It follows
that the predicate 'true' does not convey anything about the proposition which is not
present in its content. If the predicate 'true' carries any new or useful information,
then this has to do entirely with our own opinion as to how the proposition in
question should to be classified in respect of its truth value - or, as Frege might have
put it, with our views as to which of the two truth values the proposition 'names' or
'refers' to - not at all with the nature of the proposition itself. Our own opinion or
belief, however, make not the slightest difference to the facts of the matter. If
'Socrates is bald at t' is true, it is always true; and if 'The French Revolution took
place in 1689' is false, it is always false, whatever anyone might think. Truth is the
totality of 'eternally' true propositions, and falsehood is the totality of 'eternally'
false ones.
The difficulty here lies in the two key assumptions, viz. that every proposition is
necessarily true or false, i.e. that it is necessarily subject to the law of the excluded
middle; and, secondly, that a proposition cannot change its truth value without
ceasing to be the proposition it is. On these criteria, clearly a very large number of
sentences, in particular all those containing indexical expressions (Le. demonstrative
pronouns and related adverbs, tensed verbs, etc.), will fail to qualify as vehicles of
genuine propositions, for their truth value will depend upon the circumstances of
utterance, and consequently may, and indeed often does, change. So either we shall
have to fmd a way of assimilating such sentences to propositions, for example by
accepting that if they were to be made sufficiently explicit and supplied with relevant
spatio-temporal indices, their truth value might be fixed on a more permanent basis;
or, alternatively, we shall have to accept that genuine propositions are to be found
only in a fairly limited area, such as mathematics for example, where the truth value
of theorems is fixed for all time.
But leaving the issue of 'indexical' sentences to one side for the moment, the
main problem that we encounter here surely is this: that if the two assumptions above
are accepted, it becomes impossible to make clear sense of the distinction between
necessary and contingent propositions. Thus, to take one of the above examples, we
would have to say that given that 'The French Revolution took place in 1689' is
false, it is necessarily not just contingently false; what is more, if it were possible for
this proposition to have a different truth value - if, that is, it could be true, e.g. in
some world different from our own - then either it would not qualify as a genuine
proposition, or else it would have to be treated as a different proposition entirely.
So an attempt to defend the 'redundancy thesis' by invoking the supposed truth
value determinacy of 'eternal' propositions clearly won't work. But perhaps a
consideration of assertions might provide a better way of achieving the desired
objective. After all, what truth-relevant semantic difference might there be between
claiming that p is true and merely asserting p? The truth predicate here surely does
 DOES THE STRATEGY OF AUSTERITY WORK? 193

not supply any infonnation about the proposition that its assertion alone does not
provide. Rather than conveying a 'property' of p, the truth predicate, if it serves any
purpose at all, then it is simply to add emphasis to what has already been said. It is
like saying 'really' or 'honestly' p.
This latter approach certainly looks more convincing of the two; nevertheless it is
not going to satisfy the orthodox 'austerity strategist', for he is likely to argue that
what matters is not the assertion but the proposition asserted. An assertion or a truth
claim mayor may not be correct in the given instance, but if it is correct, then it is
only because the relevant proposition is true. And if 'p is true' means anything, than
it is no more and no less than that as a matter of fact p. In order to settle the issue, let
us look again at the constituent elements of the equivalence schema '<p> is true iff
p'.
The angled brackets around p, as we saw, serve as a nominalizing device,
indicating that the reference is made to the proposition, and should be read
accordingly 'The proposition that p'. As for the predicate 'true', this predicate is said
to act as a 'de-nominalizor'; its function being, as it were, to peel off the
nominalizing envelope around p. The idea, in short, is that the predicate's role is to
'cancel' the purely intra-linguistic reference to the proposition, and restore the
latter's 'objective' reference, i.e. its reference to reality.
But since we are talking here in tenns of propositions rather than sentences, the
question is, how can we be sure that a particular substitution for p on the right hand
side of the biconditional is in fact what <p> is meant to name? The symbol <p>
purportedly mentions the proposition which p expresses. But of course there are
different ways of 'mentioning' a proposition, viz. by using anyone out of a vast
variety of possible descriptive expressions, and the problem that immediately
presents itself is one of deciding on the appropriate criteria of substitution for such
expressions. How should such criteria be defined? Consider the following example:

<The cat is on the mat> is true iff the cat is on the mat.
The bracketed symbol on the left-hand side of the biconditional purports to name
the proposition expressed on the right-hand side. Since the same English sentence is
used in both cases, viz. both within and outside the nominalizing brackets, this may
seem evident enough. But suppose we change the referential symbol by replacing the
English sentence with a Gennan sentence, thus:

<Die Katze ist auf der Matte> is true iff the cat is on the mat
What is the guarantee now that the referential symbol occurring on the left-hand side
does indeed refer to the proposition expressed on the right-hand side? Unless we can
be sure that it does, we cannot be sure that the equivalence does indeed hold. But in
order to come to a decision about this, we shall need some criteria, if not necessarily
of synonymy, then certainly of extensional equivalence; and such criteria cannot be
defined without presupposing the notion of truth.
194 EDO PIVCEVIC

So it appears that we shall have to confine ourselves to talking about sentences

(of a specific language) after all, rather than talking about elusive trans linguistic
entities such as 'propositions'. Yet even if we confine ourselves to the idiom of
sentences, the equivalence schema is not necessarily thereby made much clearer. For
how do we decide whether the two occurrences of p in the equivalence schema
signity sentences or sentence-tokens? If they signity (admittedly similar, but none the
less numerically different) sentence-tokens, then equivalence between the left-hand
side and the right-hand side of the biconditional is no longer assured, for it is not
inconceivable that the two sentence-tokens might express different things.

TRUTH ASCRIPTIONS IN REFERENTIALLY OPAQUE CONTEXTS

Consider now a different possibility of interpreting the schema. What are

propositions? One way of answering this might be that propositions are the sort of
thing people assert, suppose, believe, etc. Now suppose that A asserts at t that the cat
is on the mat. Is it possible on the strength of this fact to substitute the expression
'What A asserts at t' into the schema, and claim the following equivalence:

What A asserts at t is true iff the cat is on the mat?

Not easily; and the reasons for this are plain to see. For what A asserts need not
necessarily be what the sentence on the right hand side of the bicondional expresses.
We need a separate rule to ensure this. For all we know, A may associate meanings
with 'cat' or 'mat' which have nothing to do with the meanings that normally attach
to these words. But even if he did employ these words in their customary meanings,
such inferences as may legitimately be drawn from the cat being on the mat will not
necessarily coincide with those that may be derived from his assertion to that effect.
Thus if the cat happens to be my cat Sultan, it follows that Sultan is on the mat; but
the same conclusion does not necessarily follow from what A wishes to assert, for he
may not be aware that the cat is in fact Sultan; or he may positively wish to dispute
that Sultan is on the mat. In other words, 'The cat is on the mat' - if true - may with
regard to possible inferences that may legitimately be derived from it, comprise more
than A is willing to concede.
But let us suppose for the sake of the argument that propositions are literally
identical with what people actually assert, suppose, believe, etc.; i.e. that they do not
exist except as what is asserted, supposed, believed by someone. If this were the
case, then the only appropriate way of talking of propositions would be 'What A, B,
Coo. (i.e. any specific individual) asserts, supposes, believes, etc.' But in such a case
there would be no clue as to what the variable p occurring freely on the right-hand
side of the biconditional stood for, and the equivalence schema would no longer
make any clear sense. The only way of salvaging some meaning from the schema, in
fact, would be to tum it into a straightforward tautology by repeating the same
expression on the right-hand side of the biconditional, viz. 'What A asserts is true if,
and only if, what A asserts is true'. And of course that would not be of much use to
 DOES THE STRATEGY OF AUSTERITY WORK? 195

anyone. The truth predicate would not have been explained, let alone shown to be
'dispensable'. In short, the strategy of austerity fails in this case too.

EQUIVALENCE SCHEMA AND THE INFINITY OF SUBSTITUTION RULES

In point of fact, the austerity strategy fails no matter how the schema is interpreted.
Consider again the status of the variables employed in the schema, and, in
connection with this, the problem of substitution. The schema asserts equivalence,
but what exactly is supposed to be equivalent with what? If we are talking about the
truth of propositions rather than 'sentences', one would expect the schema to work
with any coextensive sentence being substituted for p on the right-hand side of the
biconditional. Thus we might write '<The cat is on the mat> is true iff A's only
domestic pet is on the mat', assuming of course that 'the cat' and 'A's only domestic
pet' have the same reference. The sentences need not be synonymous, only
coextensive.
In fact, it is not only that the same sentence need not be repeated on the right
hand side of the biconditional for the equivalence to hold: given the 'propositional'
reading of the 'p' within the angled brackets it must in principle be possible to effect
a substitution with an infinite number of different - albeit coextensive - sentences.
Indeed one might even go further and claim that the meaning of the schema is
unclear unless p is understood as representing an infmite set of such sentences.
If this is accepted, however, then, as we saw earlier, it will be necessary to
assume, as a condition of the intelligibility of the schema, the possibility of an
infinite number of corresponding substitution rules in each case, allowing for a
replacement of p with appropriately coextensive sentences. And since such rules
cannot be arbitrary and have to be based on certain objective criteria, we shall soon
fmd that in order to clarify the schema it will be necessary to address the issue of
truth on a much broader front, if only because such criteria cannot be specified
without involving oneself in extra-logical considerations of truth conditions.
There is one further point that might be made here. It follows from what was said
above that whereas 'p' within the nominalizing angled brackets has to be taken as
representing a specific proposition, the 'p' on the right-hand side of the
biconditional, i.e. outside the angled brackets, will have to be treated as a sentential
variable, viz. as being replaceable by any old sentence that is coextensive with p
(and, of course, there is an indefinite number of such sentences). But then the schema
becomes intelligible only provided the predicate 'true' appears on both sides of the
bicondional, viz. '<p> is true iff any sentence coextensive with p is true'; and the
result is that once again we end up with a tautology, without succeeding in throwing
any light upon the concept of truth.

DOES THE SCHEMA WORK WITH IDENTICAL SENTENCES?

So the conclusion must be that in non-trivial - and hence the most interesting -
cases, i.e. when we are dealing with coextensive but non-synonymous sentences on
196 EDO PIVCEVIC

the opposing sides of the biconditional, the equivalence schema so far from
providing an adequate account of truth merely underlines the need for one. In point
of fact, it turns out that even in trivial cases the schema proves useless. Let us
consider an extreme example. Let us stipulate that the expression '<p>' names a
sentence not a proposition, and that the two occurrences of the variable p in the
schema should be replaced only by identical sentences, viz. that in both cases one
should always use identical strings of symbols; expressly excluding, that is, all
substitutions on grounds of coextensiveness, or even synonymy, in order not to get
bogged down in the problems of the criteria of substitution. The schema, in short,
would be confined strictly to individual sentences of a specific object language,
whatever such a language happened to be. This is a familiar metalinguistic stratagem,
but, as is easily seen, it is unlikely to absolve us from the need to concern ourselves
with extra-logical truth conditions, or render any tautologous repetition of the truth
predicate on both sides ofthe biconditional unnecessary.
To begin with, as we noted earlier, it is necessary to make a distinction between
sentences and sentence-tokens. We are using admittedly similar but none the less
numerically different strings of symbols on the two sides of the biconditional. What
guarantee is there that the sentence named on the left hand side of the biconditional,
when its nominalizing envelope is peeled off, conveys what the sentence-token on
the right hand side expresses? There clearly can be no such guarantee; unless, that is,
it is possible to devise a plausible theory of reference, and the attendant criteria of
extensional equivalence, for sentence-tokens. And that of course is just the kind of
issue that the strategy of austerity was supposed to be able to bypass. For, as we
recall, the intention was to show in particular that an adequate account of truth could
be provided independently of any theory of reference.
But even assuming that the substitution of the same symbol for the variable p on
both sides of the biconditional raised no problems regarding the grounds of the
distinction between the sentence and sentence-tokens, there would still be a problem
about deciding what exactly the schema did say; indeed whether it was about truth at
all! The point is that with identical symbols substituted for 'p' on both sides, the
predicate 'true' in the schema could be interpreted in any number of different ways
which had nothing to do with truth or extra-linguistic reality. All that might be
claimed about the schema is that it said something about sentences, but what exactly
is unclear. 'True' might even be read to mean 'rhymes with', or 'is a mirror image of
itself, or anything one liked, except that the predicate in such a case - whatever that
predicate happened to be - would have to be repeated on both sides of the
biconditional; yielding an un illuminating tautology.
An attempt, then, to restrict the substitutions into the equivalence schema to
identical sentences would only help to underscore its uselessness as an account of
truth. In particular it would destroy the credibility of any suggestion that the function
of the truth predicate is to 'restore' the reference of the sentence to an extra-linguistic
reality. In particular, it would provide no clue as to how it is possible, for example,
to swap singular terms with the same reference to form coextensive sentences with
identical truth values; something that is normally taken for granted. But above all, as
 DOES THE STRATEGY OF AUSTERITY WORK? 197

I have pointed out, it would give no indication as to why the schema should be
understood as conveying something about truth at all.
And so we come to the final verdict. If the equivalence schema, on any reading,
fails to give an adequate account of truth, then the conclusion must be that truth
cannot be treated as a purely 'logical' notion, and the strategy of austerity fails.
Which was to be proved

LOOKING BEYOND THE EQUIVALENCE SCHEMA

This, I think, was clear to Frege, who in search of a solution went beyond the
boundaries of the 'equivalence schema', although the actual proposal he came up
with, viz. that truth and falsehood should be treated as objects, as we saw, created
formidable problems of its own, for it entailed that all true propositions had the same
reference, and similarly for false propositions; with the extensional equivalence
based on the sameness of truth value obscuring any content-based criteria of
equivalence. What Frege was anxious to put across was that truth is not susceptible
to a 'defmition'. If an account of truth in terms of the 'equivalence schema' fails to
yield an adequate insight into the concept, he was in effect saying, then it is because
no attempt at defming truth is likely to succeed. The only alternative was to accept
that the true and the false were logically unanalysable entities, and that was all that
could be sensibly said about them. Frege was wrong of course, but at least there was
an implicit admission that truth was not an issue that could be handled by formal
logic alone.
But consider now a different possibility of looking at the equivalence schema,
viz. by treating it not as an account of truth pure and simple, but rather as an
illustration of the metalinguistic function of the truth predicate. The purpose of the
schema, it might be argued, is to make explicit the basic structure of truth claims
rather than to provide a 'definition' of truth. Indeed so far from providing a
'definition' of truth, the schema literally cries out for one. It says nothing about the
conditions under which whatever it is that the sentence named on the left-hand side
of the biconditional stands for coincides with what the sentence on the right-hand
side expresses. A separate definition, therefore, is a necessity. Nevertheless a
defmition, if it is going to be adequate, has to be such as to ensure that every well-
formed sentence of a given language can be meaningfully substituted into the
schema.
This line of approach essentially reflects the views of A. Tarski, and in what
follows I shall comment briefly on some of Tarski's ideas, without however going
into the details of his theory. Central to Tarski's concerns are the paradoxes of self-
reference, in particular as exemplified by the Liar Paradox, and the need to show
how such paradoxes might be overcome. The crucial first step towards achieving this
aim, he suggests, is to draw a distinction between 'object language' and 'meta-
language', and rather than speaking in terms of truth simpliciter treat truth as a
metalinguistic predicate applicable to a specified object language. Accordingly,
Tarski's account of truth reduces to an account of 'true in (a formally specified
198 EDO PIVCEVIC

language) L'; the main objective being to establish the necessary and sufficient
conditions of the meaningful application of the truth predicate to the sentences of the
object language in question. In other words, he is concerned with truth exclusively as
a language-relative not as a 'translinguistic' concept. This being so, he quite
understandably insists on using the idiom of 'sentences' rather than that of
'propositions'. His project, however, it should be emphasised, is concerned
principally with formalised, not natural languages.
Nevertheless Tarski's investigation is based on an implicit recognition of the fact
that the equivalence schema, alone, so far from providing a complete account of
truth, requires an explanation of the concept, and this is the point that I am
particularly anxious to stress in the present context. Tarski's own definition of truth
is couched in terms of what he calls 'satisfaction' of predicates, or 'open sentences'.
Let us then see whether it is in fact possible to inject some substance into the
equivalence schema by providing a non-trivial definition of truth in the way he
suggests.
The 'equivalence schema', as follows from my comments above, is at best
uninformative and at worst ambiguous. It does not give any precise clue as to how
the predicate 'true' should be understood. In fact, so far from being self-explanatory,
it on the contrary requires a supporting explanatory account, which might enable us
to understand just what a given exemplifying instance of the schema is meant to
convey. Now, following in Tarski's footsteps, we might look for such an account by
considering an open sentence, and trying to establish what conditions, within a given
universe of discourse, must be fulfilled for such an open sentence to yield a truth.
Take, for example, the open sentence 'x is a dog'. Clearly this will yield us a true
sentence for every value of x (from the relevant universe of discourse) that satisfies
the condition of being a dog. Similarly 'x is taller than y' will come out as true for all
ordered pairs that satisfy the condition 'taller than'. Items that satisfy such conditions
(or predicates) can be clearly identified and distinguished from each other only if
they form part of ordered sets, or sequences. A sequence of items from the given
universe of discourse that satisfy a particular predicate mayor may not be finite.
However, it is always possible to construct sequences, i.e. ordered sets, that
theoretically extend into infinity; for example, by either 'manufacturing', and
stringing up, different coextensive terms, or by endlessly reiterating the last term, or
terms, in the sequence (always, of course, subject to a suitable numerical ordering).
'Open sentences', of course, are true or false only in relation to an assignment of
values to the free variables. If within a given universe of discourse the variable x in
the open sentence 'x is F' is replaced by an individual constant, we obtain a 'closed'
singular sentence, viz. 'a is P. But an 'open sentence' can also be closed in a more
general sense by binding its variables to quantifiers, e.g. '(3x) x is F'; and it is these
latter generalised closed sentences that logicians are particularly interested in. With
regard specifically to singular sentences, they are of interest in as much as they can
be treated in principle under the general aspect of operations on predicates.
However, as we shall see presently, it is precisely the sentences of this last type
that help highlight an important weakness in the suggested defmition of truth.
 DOES THE STRATEGY OF AUSTERITY WORK? 199

Consider what is being claimed. It is claimed that a given predicate, as represented

by an 'open sentence', can generate a true sentence if there is a sequence of (one or
more) things from the relevant universe of discourse that satisfies it. Thus '(3x) x is
F' is true provided there is at least one F-thing such that it satisfies the open sentence
'x is F'. Moreover, according to Tarski's definition, if 'x is F' is satisfied by some
sequence from the given universe of discourse U, then the existential closure of it,
viz. (3x) x is F, is satisfied by all sequences of items of U, in this sense. The items of
U are subject to different arrangements, i.e. they can be ordered in different
sequences, with all the sequences containing all the items; so we stipulate that if U,
in a particular instance, satisfies a given open sentence, say 'X3 is F', for a given
assignment of values (i.e. a sequence-generating function) a, then it will also satisfy
it under a different assignment a', where a and a' are similar except that a' will
have a different item in the third place. Tarski's definition of truth, accordingly, is
'satisfiability by all sequences'.
But notice that the notion of existential quantification is presupposed, and indeed
plays a key role in the definition of satisfaction, and by implication of truth. This
inevitably gives rise to problems when it comes to explaining closed existentially
quantified sentences, for we shall not be able to avoid circularity. Thus if the formal
sentence 'There is something or other which is a dog' is true, then it is because there
is something or other which satisfies the predicate 'dog'; and the fact that the
predicate 'dog' is satisfied will have to be explained, in turn, with a reference to a
universe of discourse which contains dogs. The supposition that a universe of
discourse contains dogs, on the other hand, will itself have to be clarified in terms of
the satisfaction of the relevant predicate. So nothing much will have been
accomplished. The idiom of 'satisfaction', it seems, does little to advance our
understanding of truth.
But the difficulties of the semantic account of truth in terms of predicate
satisfaction become even more apparent if we consider singular, i.e. non-quantified
closed sentences, such as 'Socrates is bald'. The idiom of 'satisfaction' has been
invented as a convenient means of talking about predicates, or 'open' sentences. But
singular sentences are sentences without variables. How, then, can an attribution of
truth in such an instance be explained in terms of predicate satisfaction without a
circularity which is even more blatant than the one we encountered above? Given
that we are dealing with closed sentences, evidently we cannot appeal to existential
quantification as an explanatory device; even if existential quantification, on its own,
could provide much enlightenment, which, as we have seen, is doubtful, to say the
least. 'Socrates is bald' presupposes the existence of a unique individual; it does not
assert the existence of such an individual. But, then, what role might the concept of
'satisfaction' conceivably have in such an instance? To say that the sentence in
question is an example of a 'predicate satisfied' is just another way of saying that it
is grammatically complete, and this of course provides no clue as to what it means to
say that it is true. On the other hand, to say that the sentence is true because if it is
satisfied, it is satisfied by 'all sequences', is at best unhelpful, and at worst seriously
misleading.
200 EDO PIVCEVIC

So the attempt to cast light on the 'equivalence schema' by appealing to the

concept of 'predicate satisfaction' fails to come up with the goods. In point of fact,
on closer inspection it turns out that if the concept of 'satisfaction' is used in
anything other than purely trivial grammatical sense, it presupposes an
understanding of the concept of truth rather than providing a clarification of it. Thus
e.g. whilst there are many terms which might be substituted for x in 'x is F' to yield a
syntactically well-formed closed sentence, only some of them might make the
sentence true, and it is just those that do so that may be said to 'satisfy' the predicate
in a non-trivial sense. In short, we have to invoke truth in order to explain the
concept of 'satisfaction', and the result is that we are back exactly where we began.
The point is that the so-called 'semantic definition' remains not just circular (which
is the fate few philosophical defmitions can escape), but that it is circular in a
frustratingly unenlightening way, and does little to broaden our insight into the
nature of truth.

THE EQUIVALENCE SCHEMA AND THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH

To conclude, the argument that I have been advancing may be summed up as

follows. First, the equivalence schema is not just unhelpful, but, as it stands, it is not
even clear how exactly it should be understood. The only way to make it intelligible
is by trivialising it to the point where it becomes useless, viz. by employing the
predicate 'true' on both sides of the biconditional, and turning it into a
straightforward identity statement. But, then, the schema cannot be used to underpin
the redundancy thesis, let alone prove that truth is a logically simple notion.
Secondly, the equivalence schema does not enable us to understand what true
sentences have in common. It says nothing about the nature of truth. It provides a
kind of matrix of claims about particular sentences involving the predicate 'true',
without making clear what exactly is the feature that such sentences are supposed to
share. In a sense, it is like trying to explain what writing paper is by saying that it is
the sort of thing that one is likely to fmd in the drawer, because it is always kept
there; leaving it to the person concerned to make an appropriate identification. At the
same time, an attempt to turn the schema into something approaching a general
theory by binding its variables to a general quantifier leads to insoluble ambiguities,
for the topics talked about on the opposing side of the biconditional are clearly
different: whereas on the left hand side it is propositions that are being talked about,
the topic of the right hand side are the relevant bits of reality.
Thirdly, the attempt to solve the problem by equipping the equivalence schema
with a supportive definition in terms of the semantic concept of 'satisfaction' is
unsuccessful. What the semantic account does is to state the conditions under which
an open sentence can be turned into a closed true sentence. However, to state the
conditions under which an open sentence can be turned into a closed true sentence
still leaves us with the question, what it is for the sentence in question to be true? But
quite apart from this, the statement of the satisfaction conditions itself, as it turns out,
depends upon the prior grasp of the concept: the thesis that true sentences are true in
 DOES THE STRATEGY OF AUSTERITY WORK? 201

virtue of being satisfied by all sequences of items from the relevant universe of
discourse, as we saw, presupposes the notion of truth, without providing an
elucidatory account of it. In addition, the concept of satisfaction tells us little of
interest about singular sentences; yet it is just such sentences that serve as vehicles of
a very large proportion of truth claims which are made in everyday life.
So the inevitable conclusion is that the semantic account so far from injecting
substance into the equivalence schema, in the end leaves things pretty much as it
finds them. Some logicians have of course taken the view that that is precisely where
they ought to be, for the equivalence schema, in their view, was all that could be
given in 'explanation', and is moreover all that we are likely to need. But I hope to
have shown that they are mistaken.

University a/Bristol

NOTES

I In modern writings on truth the term 'deflationary' has come to denote a family of arguments
(,redundancy', 'disquotational', 'minimalist', etc.) all of which are advanced in a more or less deliberate
opposition to the metaphysical, or indeed any kind of 'substantive', and implicitly dismissed as
'inflationary', accounts of truth.
2G. Frege: 'On Sense and Reference', in Translations From the Philosophical Writings o/Gottlob Frege
by Peter Geach and Max Black, Oxford, p.64.
3 For an approach along these lines see Paul Horwich: Truth (1990).
 PREDRAG CICOVACKI

RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH:

A CRITIQUE OF DEFLATIONISM

Various arguments advanced in favor of deflationism force us to rethink our concept

of truth. Deflationists indicate numerous problems with the standard ways of
defming truth (correspondence, coherence, pragmatism), and try to convince us that
the concept of truth is far less interesting than philosophers usually take it to be. If
deflationists are right, the perennial philosophical problems concerning the nature of
truth are based on an inflated concept of truth. Their positive view is that, for any
proposition (or sentence) p, a simple equivalence schema - 'p' is true if and only if p
- captures this concept better than any traditional theory of truth. Deflationists think
the schema is sufficient to describe the logical behavior of the truth-predicate and
explain why it is useful to have such a device in our language l .
While I applaud deflationists for their challenge to the traditional ways of
defining truth, I believe that their own proposal leads in the wrong direction. Far
from being trivial and transparent, the concept of truth is complex and ambiguous.
The mistake behind the traditional theories is not that they take the concept of truth
to be richer than it is. These theories are deficient insofar as they leave perplexing
and bountiful aspects of truth unaccounted for. If my diagnosis is correct, what we
need is not to minimize the role of truth. What we need, by contrast, is a more
comprehensive theory of truth. To arrive at such a theory, we cannot simply
disregard the traditional efforts to grasp the nature of truth. We need to learn from
past mistakes and constructively utilize the best insights of the traditional and
deflationary theories in order to gain a more adequate understanding of truth.
The completion of this ambitious project would require an essay of larger scope
than the present one. My goal here is primarily to prepare the ground for this project
by considering and evaluating the main arguments proposed in favor of deflationism.
To this end I focus for the most part on the arguments advanced by Michael
Williams; in Section I I show them to be fairly typical of deflationism, but with the
advantage of being clearly formulated and supported. In Section 2 I demonstrate that
the problem of truth is not an isolated problem, as deflationists want us to believe.
Substantial theories of truth are not restricted to defming the concept of truth. There
is a range of problems concerning this concept, and the explanatory value of a theory
of truth should be tested in terms of how it handles those problems. In Section 3 I
point out the inadequacies of the equivalence schema: the schema is not sensitive to
contextual considerations, it overlooks the teleological aspect of truth, and ignores

203
J. Peregrin (ed.), Truth and its Nature (if any), 203-221.
© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
204 PREDRAG CICOVACKI

the evaluative role of the truth-predicate. In Section 4 I reconsider the traditional

theories of truth and criticize their underlying assumption that truth is a property of
propositions. I maintain that truth is more accurately understood as consisting in the
interaction of our thoughts and their objects. Section 5 summarizes the results of the
inquiry and suggests an appropriate starting point for a constructive and
comprehensive theory of truth.

1. MAIN TENETS OF DEFLATIONISM

Williams' central thesis is that we, as epistemologists, do not need a (substantial)

theory of truth (1986, pp. 223-242). This is so because the equivalence schema along
with a small number of conditions governing the use of the term 'true' tell us all, or
just about all, we need to know about truth. Williams sometimes makes an even
stronger claim, namely that truth does not admit of any further 'substantial'
explanation: "a deflationist will hold that his remarks on the behavior and utility of
the truth-predicate say just about everything there is to say about truth" (1991, p.
111).
Unlike some other deflationists2, Williams does not tell us explicitly what a
theory of truth should concern itself with. Yet a close reading of his argument reveals
the following distinguishable components. First, a theory of truth must have a
negative component that identifies what truth is not. This component should bring to
our attention some general and some specific misunderstandings or misconceptions
regarding truth. Second, a theory of truth must also have a positive component; it
should tell us what truth is. Third, a theory of truth should clarify how it compares
with other competing theories. This would demonstrate why one particular theory is
preferable over its competitors. Fourth, a theory of truth should clarify, or at least
indicate, its most relevant philosophical implications. This component would reveal
how a particular theory of truth contributes toward the resolution of some
philosophical problems.
In the attempt to convince his audience that the equivalence schema and some
additional remarks on the use of 'true' are all that is needed, Williams clearly
identifies the first and the third of the components mentioned above. He tells us, for
instance, that truth does not have any hidden nature that our theories should
eventually reveal. Williams argues, against traditional coherence theories, that truth
is not an epistemic property, i.e., that it cannot be analyzed in epistemic terms such
as justification or acceptability. Even a proposition fully supported by evidence may
tum out to be false. Williams does not really offer any positive argument to support
this commitment to 'minimal realism', as he calls it (1986, p. 224). Indeed, it is
difficult to offer any positive argument for this view, despite its immediate appeal. It
may well be that, like Tarski before him, he is simply trying to capture some of our
deepest intuitions concerning truth. Despite his commitment to minimal realism,
Williams is careful to distinguish his position from a correspondence theory of truth
(1986, p. 224; 1991, p. 238), and he is right to do so. Our intuition that the truth of
our propositions (fully or partially) depends on the way the world is, does not force
 RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH 205

us to identify truth with correspondence3 . We could say that the proposition

'Socrates died in 399 B.C.' is true if it is indeed the case that Socrates died in 399
B.C. In light of the serious difficulties traditional correspondence theories of truth
have with explaining what 'facts' and 'states of affairs' are, Williams thinks that it
may be wise to leave the right side of the biconditional the way it is. Similarly,
because ofthe problems with articulating what 'correspondence' means, it may be a
good idea to let the equivalence schema simplify the whole story.
This kind of criticism of correspondence and coherence theories leads the
proponents of detlationism to claim the detlationary view is superior to these
traditional theories. The detlationary view preserves some (minimal) features of both
kinds of theories, but it entails fewer metaphysical and epistemological commitments
and remains more tlexible. The lack of any substantial account of truth is precisely
what - in the eyes of detlationists - makes the detlationary view superior to its
alternatives (Williams, 1986, p. 226). Perhaps the equivalence schema does not say
much about truth, and perhaps the detlationary account does not directly solve any
philosophical problem. Nevertheless, this kind of account has the virtue of
preventing us from getting caught in the quicksand of the traditional philosophical
problems.

2. COMPLEXITIES OF THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH

The claims that the equivalence schema captures all we need to know about truth and
that we therefore do not need a (substantial) theory of truth seem prima facie
implausible. Williams himself, along with other detlationists, is engaged in a
complex discussion about truth. This suggests that there is a variety of issues to be
discussed about truth, and a number of claims to be made and defended.
If the thesis that we do not need any theory of truth appears to be prima facie
false, how can detlationists support their case? How can they try to persuade us that
truth is a trivial and transparent concept that does not deserve any substantial
investigation?4 Somewhat surprisingly, the support is indirect, not direct. As
Williams admits, the detlationary view does not offer "new insights into the
character of truth, but...challenges us to say why we need any theory of truth along
anything like traditional lines" (1986, p. 223). More specifically, the challenge is the
following: "What can we explain, what problems can we address if we have a
substantial theory of truth, but not if we settle for a detlationary account?" (1986, p.
224). Instead of offering positive evidence for their view, the detlationists' strategy
is to provoke us to demonstrate that we are better off with a substantial theory of
truth. The challenge is presented in explanatory terms: what can be explained by
having one kind of theory but not the other?
Before the glove is accepted, it is important to reconsider how dejlationists
differentiate between substantial and detlationary theories. Substantial theories try to
capture the nature of truth by fmding out what property all true propositions have in
common. Truth is then defined in terms of that property, regardless of whether it
turns out to be correspondence, coherence, warranted assertability, or usefulness.
206 PREDRAG CICOVACKI

Deflationists, by contrast, are not interested in that kind of project. They need not
necessarily deny that such a property exists. Nevertheless, they limit their inquiry to
the logical analysis of the concept oftruth5•
Presented in this way, the contrast between substantial and deflationary theories
boils down to the problem of defining truth. Proponents of traditional theories
believe that they can identify the defining characteristic of truth. Proponents of
deflationism are skeptical about the adequacy and usefulness of that approach, and
limit themselves to a logical analysis of the concept of truth. They do not engage in
the discussion regarding the character of that definition, i.e., whether it should
capture the meaning of the truth-predicate in natural languages, or whether it should
replace our pre-theoretical notion of truth with a formally defined substitute6 •
Deflationists satisfy themselves with the equivalence schema, which they treat
neither as an explicit nor an eliminative definition of truth. It may be claimed that the
equivalence schema is regarded as an implicit definition of truth insofar as it fixes
the extension of the truth-predicate 7.
Back to the challenge now. Davidson deserves full credit for showing that (i) the
contrast between traditional and deflationary theories is not as sharp as it is usually
presented, and that (ii) the battlefield between the opposing sides is too narrowly
confined (1990, p. 314; 1996, 264-265). With deflationists, he argues that the
traditional theories do not succeed in defining truth by either eliminating it or
reducing it to an elementary concept. Against deflationists, Davidson holds that this
does not demonstrate that the concept of truth is trivial or irrelevant. To the contrary,
truth is one of the pillars of our conceptual frameworks. Furthermore, Davidson
claims that it is folly to try to define the concept of truth, in either an explicit or an
implicit way. The whole project is misguided. What we need, according to Davidson,
is to establish a conceptual map that will show how the concept of truth relates to
other important concepts, such as meaning, intention, and linguistic behavior (1996,
p.278).
The objective of the remaining part of this section is to demonstrate that,
although Davidson's line of reasoning is essentially correct, it should be pushed
further than he himself intended. I will first argue that philosophers have been
traditionally preoccupied with issues other than defining truth. In fact, it is somewhat
ironic to call correspondence, coherence, and pragmatist theories of truth
'traditional'. Before the very end of the 19th century and the beginning of this
century, it had hardly ever been the case that a philosophical inquiry was undertaken
with the explicit goal of defining truth9 • When an explicit definition of truth is
offered (by Aristotle and Kant, for instance), what we get is an explication of how
the word 'truth' is commonly used and understood lO • Such 'nominal' definitions
serve as premises for further investigations into truth, not as their conclusions.
Passion for definitions has really become an obsession in contemporary analytic
philosophy, and it is anachronistic to accuse past masters of this vice.
One abiding problem of the traditional investigations is the possibility of false
beliefs. We aim at truth, but sometimes - even under favorable circumstances - we
miss the mark. How could that happen? How could we in principle mis-take X for Y?
 RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH 207

Plato, for instance, never provides a systematic treatment of truth, nor does he offer a
definition of truth. Yet he discusses the possibility of false logos in at least four
dialogues: Euthydemus, Cratylus, Theaetetus, and most extensively in the Sophist.
First the Greek philosophers, and after them modern philosophers, such as Bacon,
Descartes, and Kant, realize that the world is not transparent, and that a lack of that
realization leads to errors, illusions, and antinomies of various kinds. (Bacon
develops a sophisticated theory of four 'Idols', Descartes struggles with his skeptical
arguments, and Kant with the transcendental illusions of pure reason.) This concern
about the possibility of mistakes indicates why the interest of past philosophers has
gradually turned toward the relation of propositions to the world. This worry about
the possibility of mis-taking things for what they are not reveals why the issues of
correctness and correspondence have become so prominent in philosophy. In fact,
they have become so prominent that correspondence is frequently identified with
truth.
Explaining the possibility of mistakes, despite our best efforts to grasp the truth,
is one possible answer to the deflationist's challenge, presented at the beginning of
this section. Whether satisfactory or not, this kind of account is frequently present in
the traditional investigations into truth, and is entirely missing in any deflationist
theory. This kind of account is, then, one way of meeting the deflationists' challenge.
The problem of explaining the possibility of various forms of mistaken beliefs is
in turn related to another problem relevant for our consideration of truth, the problem
of criterion. First considered in great length by the Stoics and Pyrrhonians, the
problem of criterion is arguably the most important motive for the consideration of
truth in modern philosophy. That this is so need not be surprising. If we want to
determine what we can (and do) know, and if truth is one of the necessary conditions
of knowledge, we need a criterion of truth. Coherence and pragmatist theories are
presumably more strongly motivated by that concern for the proper criterion than by
a search for the defmition of truth II. We can thus argue that the problem of criterion
is yet another philosophical issue that is addressed by traditional theories and left
unexplained by deflationary theories.
The third way of answering the deflationary challenge is by recollecting the
traditional understanding of the epistemological project. The central questions of
epistemology concern the nature and limits of knowledge: "What does it mean to
know something?" and "What, if anything, can (do) we know?" Beginning with
Plato, truth is usually taken to be one of the necessary conditions for knowledge. In
order to know that p, p has to be true. The situation is similar with respect to
justification. In order to know that p, p must be (sufficiently, adequately) justified.
Since truth and justification are usually accepted as necessary conditions for
knowledge, it is initially plausible to presume that we need a theory of truth and a
theory of justification; their goal is to explain what it means for something to be true
and justified. (It is also initially plausible to believe that, in addition, we need an
account that will clarify whether the truth condition and the justification condition
are fully independent of each other.) It is true that there is an asymmetry between
truth and justification since we do not have anything like the equivalence schema for
208 PREDRAG CICOV ACKI

justification. Yet it is equally true that the equivalence schema does not contribute
anything toward clarifying the meaning of the concept of truth. Do we not, then, need
a substantial theory of truth?
These historical remarks should suffice to convince us that the traditional
concerns about truth are broadly construed. They are by no means limited to the
search for a common property in all true propositions; to claim this would simply be
to offer a distorted reconstruction of the history of Western philosophy. These
remarks also suggest that there is no good reason to reduce our concerns about truth
to a narrowly oriented search for a defmition of truth. What I will further argue is
that, as traditional theories of truth are not properly described as limited to defming
truth, deflationary theories are inadequately characterized as offering a logical
analysis of the concept of truth. A theory that purports to provide a logical analysis
of this concept must attempt to establish a broad network of logical relations
between truth and related concepts. The list of related concepts must be even broader
than the one indicated by Davidson. It should include some metaphysically relevant
concepts (such as being, existence, and reality), and also epistemological concepts
(such as knowledge, justification, error, illusion), evaluative concepts (such as
correctness and usefulness), and semantic concepts (such as reference and
satisfaction).
A theory that intends to offer a conceptual analysis of truth must be a broad,
complex, and comprehensive theory. Deflationism is none of that. Strictly speaking,
deflationism is not at all about the concept of truth. What it is about is the logical
behavior of the truth-predicate insofar as it is applicable to linguistic items. The
equivalence schema deals with the truth-predicate insofar as it is applied to
propositions such as 'That person over there is my friend Joe'; it is either true or
false that that person is my friend Joe. By contrast, the schema does not apply to, and
has nothing to do with, the use of the word 'true' in assertions like 'Joe is a true
friend'. This is a legitimate use of the word 'true', and it is not clear why this use of
'true' would not be taken into account. The content of the concept of truth is not
exhausted by one singular application of the truth-predicate, and deflationism cannot
pretend to provide a logical analysis of this concept.
Deflationism is not superior to traditional approaches to truth. Whether these
traditional approaches always succeed or not, they attempt to explain some
prominent issues concerning truth. As Aristotle remarks in the Posterior Analytics (1,
27): "More accurate and preferable to mere knowledge is that knowledge which not
only says that something is, but also why it is so."

3. INADEQUACIES OF THE EQUIVALENCE SCHEMA

The philosophical relevance of deflationism ultimately does not depend on its being
superior or inferior to the traditional theories. Its fate hangs on the importance of the
equivalence schema: Is the schema as significant as deflationists believe?
When Williams argues that the equivalence schema captures something important
about truth, this is because he maintains that "it fixes the extension of the truth-
 RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH 209

predicate for language L" (1986, p. 223). This is possible because "the
disquotational theory of truth says that we understand 'true', not by associating the
word with a property like correspondence or ideal assertability, but simply by
coming to accept all sentences (,T-sentences') of the form: 'Snow is white' is true if
and only if snow is white" (1991, p. 241).
These quotes reveal that there are two fundamental touchstones for
disquotationalism. The first consists in showing that the schema really fixes the
extension of the truth-predicate. One way of testing this is by examining whether the
schema is context sensitive 12. If the schema cannot account for contextual factors, it
eo ipso cannot account for the application of the truth-predicate in all cases. And if
this is so, the schema would turn out to be, if not incorrect, then at least incomplete.
The second touchstone for deflation ism consists in showing that there is, indeed,
an equivalence between the two sides of the biconditional. If one side claims more,
or less, than the other, there is no equivalence and the whole deflationary project
fails.
Let us consider each of these tasks separately.
Tarski, who introduces a variation of the equivalence schema, does not believe
either that the concept of truth is trivial and unambiguous, or that the schema itself
can be treated as an account of truth. The concept of truth may lead to self-referential
paradoxes, and to avoid them we need a distinction between object-languages and
meta-languages. The equivalence schema is for Tarski nothing more than an
illustration of a meta-linguistic function of the truth-predicate. The concept of truth is
thus relative to the language in which it is used, and the schema should be formulated
as 'p' is true in L if and only if p, not simply as 'p' is true if and only if p. According
to Tarski: "We must always relate the notion of truth, like that of a sentence, to a
specific language; for it is obvious that the same expression which is a true sentence
in one language can be false or meaningless in another" (1944, p. 358).
As the concept of truth is relative to a specific language, it is similarly relative to
various contextual factors. Consider, for instance, the significance of spatial and
temporal factors. Without such determinations, the sentence 'Snow is white' does not
express anything true or false. If this is a contingent claim and not part of a definition
of snow, it would not be about snow in some abstract or general sense. There is no
such thing as snow in general, so the sentence could not be referring to that. There is
only this snow or that snow, now or then. And while perhaps snow is always white
on the North Pole, it is not so in the city of Boston; a day after it falls, it is gray or
black, not white. The equivalence schema is simply incomplete if it does not relate
the notion of truth to spatial and temporal determinations. What is true today, need
not be true tomorrow. What is true here may be false there.
The whole issue is complicated further when we realize that the notion of truth
has to be related to a speaker. Despite the equivalence schema, propositions like 'I
am cold' do not express anything true or false, unless related to some individual
speakers, e.g., you and me. And when related to you and me, they can be true about
you and false about me.
210 PREDRAG CICOVACKI

Tarski does not have to worry about these problems for two reasons. First, his
semantic conception of truth deals with formalized languages in which words can be
precisely defmed and such ambiguities, characteristic of natural languages, can be
avoided. Second, Tarski defmes truth in terms of the notion of satisfaction, which is
arguably quite different from our usual conceptions of 'agreement', 'fitness',
'correctness', and so on. According to Tarski's conception, the truth of any sentence
depends on whether it is satisfied by all objects, regardless of what they are, and how
different they could be. By contrast, we usually understand truth as being context
dependent.
Since the deflationary conception of truth deals with natural languages, it must
tell us how we can avoid the possibility of one and the same sentence expressing
quite different things. If truth is context related, the context must be specified or
determined in some way. As long as this problem is not solved, the equivalence
schema cannot really fix the extension of the truth-predicate for natural languages,
which Williams takes to be the main virtue of the schema (1986, p. 223).
Deflationists advance two alternative strategies for dealing with this problem.
One, introduced by Russell and Ayer and developed by Quine, is to eliminate
indexicals, demonstratives, and vague terms by paraphrasing our context related
utterances into 'eternal sentences'. If the strategy works, it would leave the schema
intact, and make the truth-values of our sentences stable and unchanging (Quine,
1993, pp. 77-79). Horwich argues that this strategy fails because he does not believe
that eternal sentences are possible (1990, pp. 104-105). Horwich proposes an
alternative strategy: the schema must be expanded to accommodate context related
utterances, and the deflationary account must be formulated in terms of propositions,
not sentences. An immediate problem for this proposal deals with the issue of
equivalence: if the left side of the biconditional is expanded to accommodate
contextual factors, what is to guarantee that the reference of both sides is the same?
This is not something that can be assumed, for some extensions of the left-hand side
would certainly change the reference. The expansion of the schema would seem to
require a criterion by which it could be assured that the equivalence between the two
sides is preserved, and it is not clear what could serve as such a criterion.
Whatever their individual merits, both of these two (and any similar) proposals
must fail, because they are based on a mistaken assumption. Quine and Horwich both
believe that the contextually relevant factors can be captured and formalized, and
disagree with respect to how this is to be done: in terms of eternal sentences (Quine),
or by expanding the schema (Horwich). But why believe that all contextually
relevant factors could be captured and formalized in the frrst place?
To illustrate some of the difficulties involved, imagine the following
conversation. One person says: 'This is the best move'. After a while, the other
replies: 'It is true. This is the best move.' It should be obvious that we do not account
for anything if we simply apply the equivalence schema here: 'This is the best move'
is true if and only if this is the best move. In this case we would not be sure what this
assertion refers to, much less what it means.
 RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH 211

The assertion is partially clarified if we know that these people are playing chess,
and that one of them utters the sentence in question while he is making his move.
Someone familiar with chess notation could further 'liberate' the original assertion
from some of its contextual elements by reformulating it as follows: 'In the position
where white has his king on gl, queen on dl, etc., and black has his king on g8,
queen on d7, etc., the move I. Qd l-h5 is the best'. This reformulation gives the exact
position on the board, regardless of whether we are at the site of the game, and
regardless of the time when the game is played. All of this must sound promising to
deflationists, and yet one difficult problem remains: How should we understand the
phrase 'the best move'? When the player makes his move and asserts: 'This is the
best move', he could have one of virtually infinitely many things in mind. For
instance, he could mean: 'This is the only move that prevents a checkmate', or 'This
move gives me a chance to draw', or 'This move will win a pawn', or 'This move
starts a dangerous attack', or 'This move transposes my position into a favorable
endgame'. Or perhaps he could have in mind something like: 'This is the best move I
could come up with', or 'Not even a grandmaster would find a better move', or 'I am
going to scare my opponent by telling him that this is the best move'. The list can go
on and on, and unless we can check with the player we cannot be sure what the
intended meaning is. Even the opponent need not be sure of that, and when he
replies: 'It is true. This is the best move', he may have in mind something different
than the other player. His reasoning may be: 'This is the best move because I do not
know how to continue now'. Or he may think: 'My opponent is playing better than
ever. He is going to beat me this time,13.
How, then, could this relevant contextual factor be captured and formalized?14
How could it ever be either eliminated or incorporated in the schema? Deflationists
may try the following strategy: let us 'objectify' the situation by arguing that in every
position there is one best move. Let us furthermore defme the best move as one that
maximizes the chances of winning the game and/or minimizes the chances of losing
the game. The proposition in question is then true if and only if the move in question
maximizes the chances of winning the game and/or minimizes the chances of losing
the game; otherwise it is false. The proposition now appears to be de-contextualized
and assigned a definite truth-value, regardless of whether we know what its truth-
value is. This is what deflationists want (see Quine, 1993, p. 79), and it seems that
they can accomplish their goal.
This strategy is not without its problems. For instance, it is dubious that in every
position there is one and only one best move 15 . One excellent move in the given
position maximizes the player's chances of winning by starting a dangerous attack on
the opponent's king. Another excellent move in the same position maximizes the
player's chances of winning by transposing a middlegame position into a favorable
ending. In terms of an imaginary quantitative scale, both moves can have the same
value. The preference of one move over the other will depend on the player's style,
on his awareness of the opponent's strengths and weakness, on the momentary
inspiration, on the amount of available time, or some other factors.
212 PREDRAG CICOVACKI

The player's intentions and goals cannot be dismissed; whether his move is the
best or not will partially depend on them. It could be the best with respect to one
goal but not so with respect to another. If the player's intentions and goals cannot be
dismissed, his utterance cannot be fully de-contextualized and objectified. The
content of the player's assertion depends on more than the words used and their
grammatical and logical connections. The content of his assertion cannot be
identified independently of the act of speaking. Put more generally, the
meaningfulness of language cannot be accounted for on the discursive level alone 16 •
If this is really so, if some contextual factors cannot be fully captured and
formalized, the equivalence schema cannot be fully context sensitive. And this means
that the schema cannot fix the extension of the truth-predicate.
Weare now in a better position to examine the second issue critical for the
evaluation of deflationism, i.e., the question of the equivalence between the two
sides of the biconditional. A cursory look at any variation of the schema shows that
the left-hand side always contains more than the right-hand side. Why, then, should
we assume that they are equivalent?
One typical answer is offered by Crispin Wright:

Why does it seem that any competitive account of truth must respect the
[equivalence schema]? Relatedly, why just that starting point for the
deflationary conception? The answer, I suggest, is that standing just behind
the [equivalence schema] is the basic, platitudinous connection of assertion
and truth: asserting a proposition - a Fregean thought - is claiming that it is
true (1992, p. 23).

Frege was presumably the first philosopher who believed that the thought that
snow is white is true contains no more than is expressed by the proposition 'Snow is
white,17. Hence, Wright's reference to Frege is not accidental. Frege closely related
the truth-value of a proposition to its reference: the relation of a proposition to its
truth-value is analogous to that between a name and a thing named. Thus, in Frege
we can find motivation for something like an equivalence schema, and also a source
of the idea that the equivalence schema can fix the extension of the truth-predicate.
What are the merits of the thesis that asserting a proposition is claiming that it is
true? There is no need to question whether this holds in some cases; undoubtedly it
does. The question is whether it always holds. And the answer seems to be equally
clear: no, it does not. Just as doing X does not imply believing that it is good to do X,
asserting something does not imply taking it to be true 18 • When a coach tells his
players before the game that they have the hearts of champions, when a politician
promises to rebuild the country, when an actor plays his role on the stage, when a
student answers his teacher's questions, when a chess player claims that he is making
the best move - they are not necessarily concerned with the truth of their assertions.
They can be guided by reasons different than truth: motivating players, assuring as
many votes as possible, making a memorable performance, getting a good grade,
 RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH 213

scaring the opponent, and so on. There are numerous clear examples of seriously
asserting a proposition without claiming that it is true.
There is no implication in one direction, but perhaps it is more interesting to
examine whether it holds in the opposite direction. Disquotationalism is based on the
idea that claiming a proposition is true is saying nothing more than what is asserted
by the proposition itself. In Quine's words: "The truth predicate is superfluous when
ascribed to a given [proposition]; you could just utter the [proposition]" (1993, p.
80). It may, thus, be the case that disquotationalists do not need an equivalence; an
implication from left to right may be all they need.
Unfortunately for disquotationalists, their view is just as mistaken as the view
that to assert a proposition is to claim that it is true. As we have seen in our chess
example considered above, the reference of a proposition need not be established
clearly and uniquely by the words uttered. It is sometimes impossible to say what
assertion is made by uttering a referential proposition without adverting to the
contextual features of the act of utterance in general, and the intentions and goals of
the speaker in particular. When our assertions 'aim at truth', they contain an
irreducible teleological component l9 • Consequently, the extent to which they hit the
target depends not only on the features of the situation and environment; it also
depends on the speaker's goals and intentions. Because of the significance of the
teleological component, an analogy with action is again useful. There is an
analogous distinction between oS's doing of X' is good and S is doing X on the one
hand, and OS's assertion that p' is true and S asserts that p on the other. To tell
someone that S is doing X is to describe what S is doing. To say that S' s doing of X
is good is to evaluate S's action. Similarly, when we say that a proposition is true, we
say something more, and something different, than the proposition itself. To say that
S's assertion that p is true is to evaluate S's assertion, not to repeat it. When we aim
at truth, what we mean when we assert that a proposition is true is that the goal has
been accomplished. Since this goal - to attain truth - is a universally shared norm,
the concept of truth has a normative aspect.
The truth-predicate plays an important evaluative role in our language, and the
concept of truth has an irreducible normative aspect. Deflationists forget, or perhaps
overlook, this insight. As there is no implication from the right-side to the left-side of
the alleged biconditional, there is no implication in the opposite direction either. The
equivalence schema is not just incomplete but incorrect. Deflationism does not
provide an adequate account of truth.

4. BEYOND DEFLA nONISM

An old proverb has it that in everything false there is something true. Is there
anything that deflationism is right about? Is there anything that we can learn from
deflationism? According to Davidson, deflationists are wrong in their conclusions
but right in what they reject (1996, p. 265). And what they reject is the analysis of
truth in terms of either correspondence or coherence. Deflationary rejection of both
kinds of theories is based on suspicion for the idea that truth is a property of
214 PREDRAG CICOVACKI

propositions. Although deflationists themselves are not united in why, and how, they
criticize this idea20, they may be putting a finger on something important.
What, then, could be wrong with the idea that truth is the property of
propositions? One thing may be that substantial theories of truth identify a single
characteristic of truth and then define truth in terms of that characteristic. In doing
so, they make the mistake of overstating the significance of that characteristic for our
overall understanding of truth.
This is a fairly obvious mistake. But there is a related and deeper 'truth trap' here
which even deflationists fall victim to. Although they distance themselves from
correspondence theories, deflationists try to capture the 'correspondence intuition'
that truth depends on the way the world is. Their opposition to epistemic theories, by
contrast, is unequivocal. In Williams' words, "truth depends on the way the world is,
not on the way we think.. jt is" (1986, p. 224). The trap is to think that truth must
depend either on the way the world is, or the way we think it is. But why would that
be so? Since 'being dependent on Z' admits of degrees, is it not possible that, even if
truth does depend on the way the world is, this is not the only factor on which truth
depends? Indeed, it may be that in a significant way truth also depends on the way
we think. A look at the equivalence schema itself suggests that these two claims are
not as incompatible as Williams maintains. This schema is a convention introduced
to fix the domain of application of the truth-predicate relative to the language of a
speaker. In this way the equivalence schema indicates that the truth of a proposition
depends not only on the way the world is, but also on what the relevant words mean.
And what the words mean is not simply and exclusively a linguistic concern.
Understanding a proposition is, as Wittgenstein points out, a complex language
game. What this means in the present context is that the truth-value of our
propositions depends on, among other things, our conceptual framework, our
background beliefs, and our intentions and goals.
I want to argue now that there are two ways in which the idea that truth is a
property of propositions traps our thinking about truth. First, if truth is a property,
i.e., something owned by propositions, they either possess it or not. (This is why the
idea that truth is a property is still appealing to some deflationists.) By contrast, I
claim that truth admits of degrees; our ideas and theories can be more or less true.
They express truth in various degrees, the extreme cases of which are 'entirely true'
and 'entirely false'. Second, as long as we think of truth as a property, we cannot
make clear sense of the idea that truth depends both on the way the world is and on
how we think it is. To pursue this idea, I maintain that truth consists in the
interaction of our thoughts and their objects. If truth is a property at all, it is so only
to a secondary degree.
Although this idea is not new - it is at least as old as Plato's Republic - it seems
difficult to accept that truth admits of degrees. But perhaps this is our prejudice.
Consider the case of self-knowledge. There is nothing I am more familiar with than
myself. Yet I do not have to be a Freud to realize that I only partially understand my
own motives, aspirations, and value systems. I am familiar with them only to a
limited degree, and there are many of them of which I am not even conscious. I
 RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH 215

frequently rationalize my own behavior and presumably misrepresent my genuine

motives for action. I know myself only to a certain degree.
It is similar with what is called 'knowledge by acquaintance'. I know that that
person over there is my friend Joe. I am familiar with many of his philosophical
views, but not all of them. Moreover, I am not always sure to what extent I am
familiar with the reasons and motives behind his philosophical views. I know Joe to
a certain extent and yet presumably have many misconceptions of him at the same
time.
Partial understanding and knowledge are the reflections of partial truths. And
these are not peculiar only to self-knowledge and knowledge by acquaintance. They
are characteristic of all our thinking, of all our efforts to understand the world around
us and our own place and role in reality.
Correspondence theories correctly insist that truth depends on the way the world
is. But they mistakenly separate man from the world, and our thinking from its
objects. As a consequence, they try to identify truth in terms of what could be
characterized as a 'geometrical congruence' between our thoughts and their objects.
(Deflationary theories leave the separation intact, but characterize truth in terms of a
'logical congruence'.) Coherence theories correctly emphasize the relevance of our
conceptual apparatus and background beliefs. Yet they underestimate the degree to
which truth depends on the way the world is and sever our ties with reality.
Pragmatists correctly underline the functional role of truth, i.e., its connectedness to
our intentions and goals, and its relevance for our practical orientation in the world.
But they also tend to ignore some of the constraints on the side of the object.
What are these constraints on the side of the object? First, there is the respective
simplicity or complexity of objects or events we try to grasp in our thinking. Objects
and events contain more or less components. A geometrical figure involves more
components than a straight line. One billiard ball hitting another is less complex to
grasp than action on a football field. (For those not familiar with football, it may
appear that both kinds of activities are similar.) The second kind of constraint deals
with the plasticity of observed objects and events. A simple curved line is normally
more plastic than an equally simple straight line. The shape of a cloud is more plastic
than that of a square. One could be seen in more ways than the other; one allows
more interpretations than the other.
There are, similarly, two kinds of constraint on the side of the subject. First, there
is the respective simplicity or complexity of the subject. It is not measured by the
number of parts or components involved, but by the level of sophistication of the
subject's conceptual apparatus and background beliefs. The more sophisticated they
are, the more they enable us to comprehend the world around us. A layman entering
a lab for the first time would not grasp as much as a trained physicist who works
there. Second, there is the respective plasticity of the subject. It is manifested by the
degree of fluidity or rigidity of the subject's goals, intentions, and expectations.
Rigidly defmed expectations and goals could make us blind to certain aspects of the
presented situation. Fluid and flexible expectations and goals make us open-minded
and sensitive to unexpected things.
216 PREDRAG CICOVACKI

Out of these four kinds of constraint, correspondence theories take into account
only the fIrst kind on the side of the object, and make it look as if truth is a one-way
relation from objects to subjects. They try to convince us that in cognition we copy,
or reflect, what the objective situation is. Coherence theories, by contrast, recognize
the relevance of the frrst kind of constraint on the side of the subject, and in some
cases also the plasticity on the side of the object. They also make truth look like a
one-way relation, except that the direction is reversed in comparison to
correspondence theories.
Pragmatism is based on a more dynamic understanding of knowledge and truth
than the other two kinds of theories. The subject and the object are not treated as
separated by a gulf they can never fully overcome. It is thus not surprising that
pragmatists come closer than correspondence and coherence theorists to a
recognition of the interactive nature of truth. In James' words, "The truth of an idea
is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is
made true by events" (1907, pp. 77-78). Pragmatists clearly recognize both kinds of
constraint on the side of the subject. Our inquiry, our pursuit of truth, is an active
human manipulation of the environment, a manipulation guided by our needs and
interests. Our inquiry is not an individual project; it is a common project in which
cooperation with other human beings is of vital importance. This cooperation is
based not only on common needs and interests, but also on our previous knowledge
and truths. Our various thoughts and truths are closely related to other thoughts and
truths; they feed on each other and lean on each other. As James puts it, "Truth lives,
in fact, for the most part on the credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs 'pass', so
long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass as long as nobody refuses
them" (1907, p. 80).
Pragmatists also recognize the plasticity on the side of the object. Cognition is for
them an active intervention, an active manipulation of the environment. In fact, they
go too far in believing that the plasticity of the environment is almost infInite. The
environment is not in a state of constant flux, and not everything goes. We can utilize
the environment, we can manipUlate it in accordance with our needs and interests,
but this manipUlation has its limits. When a cabinetmaker works on different kinds of
wood, his craft is constrained by the natural properties of wood, and not just by his
own, or his customers', needs and interests. To be a good craftsman, one must be
able to answer and respond to the properties of the material one is working with. As
genuine products require the interaction of our goals and interests with the material
involved, truth does not only consist in action driven by our goals, needs, and
interests. Truth consists in an inter-action.
Thus, to argue that truth consists in an interaction involves more than simply
arguing against the idea that truth is a property of propositions. When I claim that
truth consists in an interaction, I intend to offer a more balanced picture than either
of those provided by the previously considered theories. Although I remain
sympathetic with the pragmatists' dynamic understanding of truth, I reject their
overemphasis of human actions and goals21 • Although I am committed to the
correspondence intuition that truth depends on the way the world is, I reject
 RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH 217

Williams' anxiety that any concession to the epistemic theories would mean to
"collapse what is true into what we think .. .is true" (1991, p. 238). This fear is
unwarranted, and there are two ways of warding it off.
A more specific one, defended by Dummett (1978) and Putnam (1981), is as
follows. The question is whether epistemic theories of truth are necessarily about the
truth conditions of a truth bearer, or whether they can also be about the conditions
under which a truth bearer could be asserted. If the former is the case, epistemic
analyses of truth are more or less identical with coherentism. According to this view,
truth does not transcend evidence, and the distinction between what we think is true
and what is true is usually denied. This is the view that Williams has in mind when
he criticizes 'traditional coherence theories' and 'epistemic analyses of truth'. This is
also the view that he has in mind when he argues that truth depends on the way the
world is, not on the way we think. But there is a less radical and more flexible way of
understanding truth as having an epistemic aspect that Williams neglects or
overlooks. This view is that, if the way we think is important for truth, this is not so
because it makes our beliefs well supported or justified. What the way we think
affects and determines is not the truth of a proposition, nor the truth conditions of
that proposition. The way we think rather affects and determines the conditions
under which a proposition can be stated and its truth-value determined. Thus, to
claim that truth depends on the way we think does not necessarily lead to the
rejection of realism. Nor does it necessarily lead to a conception of truth that would
deny that it, at least partially, depends on the way the world is. The claim that truth
depends on the way we think is compatible with both realism and theories that
understand truth in terms of agreement or fitness of thought with reality.
A more general way of vanquishing Williams' fear is based on the idea that, as
human beings, we do not live in an environment to which we simply react. What we
live in is more than the mere presence of an independently existing physical reality.
We live not in an environment, but in a world. The world in which we live is
complex and plastic, and its complexity and plasticity allow us to experience it in
accordance with our conceptual framework, background beliefs, standards of
accuracy, our intentions and goals, and so on22 •
Williams believes that "epistemic analyses of truth ... compromise the objectivity
of worldly knowledge, which is no longer knowledge of what is there anyway"
(1991, p. 223). This claim, however, is too strong. The realization of our active
engagement in cognition does prevent us from talking about our thoughts as being
'true of the world', if that is taken to mean a mirror image, and a uniquely and
absolutely true description of our environment. But, as Campbell correctly
emphasizes, that does not imply that our thoughts are mere constructions, that they
are not 'true to the world' (1992, p. 434). They are true to the world not by copying
it, but by being faithful to it, by taking into account the world's own constraints. Our
cognitive experience is not a mere reaction to what happens in the detached world.
We are not separated from the world. We are situated in it. Our cognition consists in
a mutual interaction of thoughts and their objects, and our considerations of truth
218 PREDRAG CICOVACKI

should retlect and help us understand further the nature of this interaction. As Henri
Bergson nicely puts it,

Every truth is a path traced through reality: but among these paths there are
some to which we could give an entirely different turn if our attention had
been orientated in a different direction or if we had aimed at another kind of
utility; there are some, on the contrary, whose direction is marked out by
reality itself: there are some, one might say, which correspond to currents of
reality. Doubtless these also depend upon us to a certain extent, for we are
free to go against the current or to follow it, and even if we follow it, we can
variously divert it, being at the same time associated with and submitted to
the force manifest within it. Nevertheless, these currents are not created by us;
they are part and parcel of reality (1947, p. 217).

5. CONCLUSIONS AND PROSPECTS

Detlationists are wrong to argue that the concept of truth is trivial and unimportant,
and that it can be captured by means of a simple equivalence schema. They are also
wrong in completely rejecting more substantial efforts to apprehend the concept of
truth. Although frequently one-sided and narrowly oriented, we can still learn from
these past efforts. They contain some correct insights, some grains of truth, which we
must incorporate into a more adequate theory.
We cannot give up on truth. Truth is one of the central concepts in our
philosophical and non-philosophical vocabularies. We know how to use this concept
correctly in familiar contexts, but we do not have a full understanding of it. Perhaps
no theory, no matter how elaborate and sophisticated, would be able to encompass
all the intricacies and subtleties of the concept of truth. But try to grasp them we
must.
The problem is: Where do we start? Our inquiry has opened so many
possibilities, it has related the concept of truth to so many issues, that it is not easy to
see where a starting point for a constructive and comprehensive theory should be.
My suggestion is that we do not start by searching for a defmition, but by looking
deep inside ourselves. We immediately react to the detlationary minimalization of
the role of truth, but why is that so? Why is truth so important for us? Why is what
passes for truth not good enough? What difference, if any, does truth really make?
Although we end up rejecting their conclusions, we must recognize that
detlationists do us all a favor by forcing us to rethink our concept of truth. And
perhaps the most fundamental way of rethinking this concept is by re-examining our
commitment to truth: Trivial or complex, why does truth matter in the first place?

College ofthe Holy Cross

 RETHINKING THE CONCEPT OF TRUTH 219

NOTES
1 Who are the deflationist philosophers? Horwich, himself a deflationist, holds that "more or less
deflationary views about truth" were endorsed and defended by Frege, Ramsey, Ayer, Wittgenstein,
Strawson, and Quine (1990, p. 6). Among more recent deflationists he mentions S. Leeds, A. Fine, S.
Soames, H. Field, and M. Williams. This list is of course controversial, if for no other reason than
because the views of these philosophers differ to a significant degree. Since my argument is directed
against all of those who minimize the significance and role of the concept of truth, I will ignore the
differences between the so-called disquotationalists, minimalists, and other deflationists.
2 See, for instance, (Soames, 1984, pp. 411-416), and (Horwich, 1990, p. 7).
3 This thesis is one of the central points of Alston's 'realist' and 'minimalist' conception of truth; see
(Alston, 1996, ch. 1, esp. pp. 32-37).
4 Horwich believes that "nothing could be more mundane and less puzzling than the concept of truth"
(1990, xi).
5 Following Stephen Leeds, Williams holds (1991, p. 112) that "the traditional theories are genuinely
theories of truth whereas deflationary theories are theories of the concept of truth (or, we could say,
accounts of the use of 'true')."
6 The former view is defended by Putnam, the latter by Quine; see (Putnam, 1994, pp. 332-335), and
(Quine, 1993, pp. 81-82). Tarski's attempt to find a materially adequate (to the original meaning of the
word) and formally correct definition of truth seems to include both ways of defining truth.
7 Williams (1986, p. 223). See also (Horwich, 1990, pp. 35-37). According to Quine (1993, pp. 81-82),
"The disquotational account of truth does not define the truth-predicate - not in the strict sense of
'definition'; for definition in the strict sense tells how to eliminate the defined expression from every
desired context in favor of previously established notation. But in a looser sense the disquotational
account does define truth. It tells us what it is for any sentence to be true, and it tells us this in terms just
as clear to us as the sentence in question itself. We understand what it is for the sentence 'Snow is white'
to be true as clearly as we understand what it is for snow to be white."
8 While I agree with Davidson that the concept of truth is one of the most basic, I do not see how he can
claim that this concept is clear (see 1990, p. 314). Our conflicting intuitions about truth, as well as
numerous fruitless attempts to elucidate this concept, suggest otherwise.
9 If Frege is properly regarded as a precursor of deflationism, the deflationary conceptions of truth emerge
at the same time as the 'traditional' theories of truth.
10 For a discussion of Aristotle, see (Campbell, 1992, pp. 120-144). For a discussion of Kant, see
(Cicovacki, 1997, pp. 159-197).
11 For further discussion, see (Walker, 1989).
12 Another way of testing it could be presented as follows. Suppose that we accept the view that theories
and not only individual propositions can be true or false, as is frequently assumed by scientists and
philosophers of science. What is not obvious is whether the equivalence schema applies equally well to
theories and individual propositions. Theories do not consist of a set of propositions mechanically stapled
together; they consist of wholes or unities, in which various parts (linguistic items) play diverse
descriptive, explanatory, and normative roles. This raises a number of questions: Is the equivalence
schema sensitive to the different roles that individual propositions play within a larger whole? Should the
equivalence schema be applied to individual propositions regardless of the broader context in which they
are asserted? Would it make sense to evaluate the truth value of every individual proposition that belongs
to a theory? Taking into account their multiple functions, can we claim that theories have identifiable
220 PREDRAG ClCOY ACKl

referents, as individual propositions normally do? A further elucidation of these and similar issues
deserves further inquiry.
13 This is why Lemmon correctly argues that the 'context of utterance' involves not only the time, the
place, and the identity of the participants, but also the features of the situation in which the conversation
takes place, what has been said in their previous conversations, the histories of the participants, and so on
(1966, p. 91).
14 Campbell argues that sometimes even the specification of the context is not "sufficient to identify what
statement is being made" (1992, p. 371).
15 Another problem is that a move - sayan attacking move - which maximizes our chances of winning
may at the same time maximize, not minimize, our chances of losing the game.
16 This point is emphasized by Campbell (1992, pp. 417-420), and Putnam (1994, p. 318).
17 Frege's actual example is different; see (Frege, 1918-1919, p. 353).
18 Would anyone defend an equivalence schema for action, i.e., something like: It is good that "S does X"
if and only if S does XI
19 Campbell (1992, pp. 416-420) underlines this point.
20Deflationists disagree with respect to whether or not truth is a property in the first place. Those who
accept that truth is a property (after all) argue that it a logical rather than a substantial or natural property.
For different views on these issues, see (Ramsey, 1931, p. 142; Horwich, 1990, pp. 2 and 38; Wright,
1992, pp. 15-17 and passim; Quine, 1994, pp. 498-499).
21 Although he distances himselffrom pragmatism, Campbell argues explicitly that the locus of truth is in
action (1992, p. 415 and passim), Like pragmatists, he overstates the role of the teleological component
of truth.
22 For further discussion of this view, see (Cicovacki, 1997).

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