9780198752240

What is truth? Paul Horwich gives the definitive exposition of a notable philosophical theory, 'minimalism'. This is the controversial theory that the nature of truth is entirely captured in the trivial fact that each proposition specifies its own condition for being true, and that truth istherefore, despite the philosophical struggles to which it has given rise, an entirely mundane and unpuzzling concept. Horwich makes a powerful case for the minimalist view, and gives a careful systematic explanation of its implications for a cluster of important philosophical issues on whichquestions about truth have impinged. The first edition of Truth, published in 1990, established itself both as the best account of minimalism and as an excellent introduction to the debate for students. For this new edition Paul Horwich has refined and developed his treatment of the subject in the light of subsequent discussions,while preserving the distinctive format which made the book so successful. It appears simultaneously with his new book Meaning, a companion work which sets out the broader philosophical context for the theory of truth: an account of meaning which seeks to accommodate the diversity of valuableinsights that have been gained in the twentieth century within a common-sense view of meaning as deriving from use. The two books together present a compelling view of the relations between language, thought, and reality. Horwich's demystification of meaning and truth will be essential reading forall philosophers of language. Praise for the first edition: 'subtle, penetrating and ingenious . . . everyone interested in philosophy is in his debt' Michael Dummett, University of Oxford 'lucid and compact . . . a forthright presentation of an interesting thesis' Donald Davidson, University of California, Berkeley 'This is an excellent book and deserves to be widely read and used as a text. It states its thesis clearly and argues for it briskly: a style that seems well calculated to start discussions . . . It seems like an admirable starting-point for several weeks' worth of discussions in a philosophy oflanguage course at upper-division undergraduate level.' Australasian Journal of Philosophy 'clearly written and well-structured' British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

1 The Minimal Theory

(14)

A Sketch of the Minimalist Conception

(7)

The Space of Alternative Theories

(4)

Summary of Alleged Difficulties

(3)

The following is a list of the questions and problems regarding minimalism to which replies and solutions will be proposed in the course of this essay

2 The Proper Formulation

(29)

1. `Of what kinds are the entities to which truth may be attributed?'

(1)

2. `What are the fundamental principles of the minimal theory of truth?'

(3)

3. `It seems unlikely that instances of the equivalence schema could possibly suffice to explain all of the great variety of facts about truth.'

(3)

4. `The minimal theory must be incomplete, for it says nothing about the relationships between truth and affiliated phenomena such as verification, practical success, reference, logical validity, and assertion.'

(2)

5. `Even if the minimal theory is, in some sense, "adequate" and "pure", it is nevertheless unsatisfactory, being so cumbersome that it cannot even be explicitly formulated.'

(6)

6. `If there were really no more to a complete theory of truth than a list of biconditionals like "The proposition that snow is white is true if and only if snow is white", then, since one could always say "p" rather than "The proposition that p is true", it would be inexplicable that our language should contain the word "true": there would be no point in having such a notion.'

(2)

7. `The minimal theory fails to specify what are meant by attributions of truth. It fails to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the applicability of the truth predicate.'

(3)

8. `Is the minimalist conception concerned with truth itself or with the word "true"?'

(1)

9. `Even if we grant that, as predicates go, the truth predicate is highly unusual--even if we grant that its function is to enable us to say certain important things while avoiding new forms of quantification--it surely does not follow that being true is not a genuine property.'

(3)

10. `If the equivalence schema is relied on indiscriminately, then the notorious "liar" paradoxes will result.'

(4)

3 The Explanatory Role of the Concept of Truth

(8)

11. `Truth has certain characteristic effects and causes. For example, true beliefs tend to facilitate the achievement of practical goals. General laws such as this call for explanation in terms of the nature of truth. Therefore there must be some account of what truth is, going beyond the minimalist story, that provides a conceptual or naturalistic reduction of this property.'

(2)

12. `Another lawlike generalization is that beliefs obtained as a result of certain methods of inquiry tend to be true. Again this suggests that the minimalist conception overlooks truth's causal/explanatory nature.'

(2)

13. `A further explanatory role for truth lies in the fact that the truth of scientific theories accounts for their empirical success.'

(2)

14. `Even if all our general beliefs about truth are deducible from the minimal theory (suitably augmented), this does not imply that no deeper analysis of truth is desirable; for one might well hope to find something that will show why it is that the equivalence schema holds.'

(2)

4 Methodology and Scientific Realism

(16)

15. `Doesn't the deflationary perspective--the renunciation of a substantive notion of truth--lead inevitably to relativism: to the idea that there is no such thing as objective correctness?'

(1)

16. `Isn't the minimalist perspective in some sense antirealist? Does it not deny that scientific theories are intended to correspond to a mind-independent world?'

(3)

17. `Is it notobvious that the nature of truth bears directly on the structure of reality and the conditions for comprehending it? Surely, "truth" and "reality" are semantically inextricable from one another; so how could one's position in the realism debate be divorced from one's conception of truth?'

(4)

18. `If, as the minimal theory implies, "truth" is not defined as the product of ideal inquiry, why should we believe that an ideal inquiry would provide the truth?'

(2)

19. `How is it possible, given the minimal theory, for truth to be something of intrinsic value, desirable independently of its practical utility?'

(1)

20. `How can minimalism accommodate the idea of science progressing towards the truth?'

(1)

21. `From the perspective of the minimalist conception of truth, it is impossible to produce an adequate justification of scientific methods.'

(4)

5 Meaning and Logic

(18)

22. `As Davidson has argued, understanding a sentence, say, "Tachyons can travel back in time", is a matter of appreciating what must be the case for the sentence to be true--knowing its truth condition. That is to say, one must be aware that "Tachyons can travel back in time" is true if and only if tachyons can travel back in time. Therefore it is not possible to agree with the minimalist claim that this knowledge also helps to constitute our grasp of "is true". For in that case we would be faced with something like a single equation and two unknowns. Rather, if knowledge of the truth conditions of "Tachyons can travel back in time" is to constitute our understanding that sentence, then this knowledge would presuppose some pre-existing conception of truth.'

(3)

23. `What about falsity and negation?'

(2)

24. `As Frege said, logic is the science of truth; so surely our accounts of truth and logic should be, if not identical, at least bound up with one another. Yet the minimal theory does not even enable one to prove that the principle of non-contradiction is true.'

(1)

25. `Minimalism cannot be squared with the role that the notion of truth must play in the foundations of logic--in justifying one logic over another.'

(2)

26. `How can truth-value gaps be admitted?'

(2)

27. `Doesn't philosophy require truth-value gaps in order to accommodate such phenomena as non-referring names, vagueness, the emotivist conception of ethics, etc.?'

(1)

28. `It is obvious that many predicates--for example, "blue", "small", "bald", "heap"--do not have definite extensions; and when such predicates are applied to certain objects the result will surely be propositions with no truth value.'

(6)

29. `There is a substantive issue in meta-ethics as to whether evaluative utterances purport to assert truths or whether they are merely expressions of feeling; but this question would be trivialized by minimalism.'

(2)

6 Propositions and Utterances

(18)

30. `Propositions are highly dubious entities. It is unclear what they are supposed to be, and their very existence is controversial. Would it not be better, therefore, to develop a theory of truth that does not presuppose them--by assuming, for example, that utterances are the primary bearers of truth?'

(4)

31. `The case for propositions assumes the adequacy of a certain logical analysis of belief--one that construes the state of belief as a relation between a person and a kind of entity, the content of the belief. But this assumption is plagued with familiar difficulties and appears to be mistaken.'

(3)

32. `"The proposition that p is true iff p" can be thought to capture our conception of truth only if truth is not already presupposed in the very idea of a proposition. But this requirement may well be violated. For a central component of the notion of proposition is lodged in the statement of identity conditions for propositions--the conditions for two utterances to express the same proposition. But this is an idea one might plausibly explain in terms of the intertranslatability of the utterances, which, in turn, must be construed as their having the same truth conditions. And if the concept of truth is needed to say what propositions are, then a theory of truth cannot take propositions for granted.'

(2)

33. `The "use theory" of meaning implies that propositions don't exist. For if translation is a matter of resemblance in use, then it is not a transitive relation, and so there can be no such things as "what intertranslatable utterances have in common".'

(3)

34. `Many philosophers would agree that if propositions exist then propositional truth would be covered by something like the equivalence schema. But they might still maintain that the truth of an utterance consists in its "correspondence with reality", or some other substantive thing. Thus, it is for utterances that the deflationary account is controversial, and this position has received no elaboration or defence.'

(6)

7 The `Correspondence' Intuition

104

(14)

35. `Is it not patently obvious that the truth or falsity of a statement is something that grows out of its relations to external aspects of reality?'

104

(1)

36. `Is it not equally clear that, contrary to minimalism, statements are made true by facts to which they correspond?'

105

(3)

37. `Certain cases of representation (e.g. by maps) clearly involve a correspondence--a structural resemblance--to what is represented. So is it not reasonable to expect some such relation in linguistic representation also?'

108

(2)

38. `The minimal theory fails to show how the truth of a sentence depends on the referential properties of its parts.'

110

(3)

39. `The great virtue of defining truth in terms of reference is that the account may be supplemented with a naturalistic (causal) theory of the reference relation to yield, in the end, a naturalistic and scientifically respectable theory of truth.'

113

(5)

Conclusion

118

(2)

Postscript

120

(27)

Bibliography

147

(8)

Index