'Truth Predicates' in Natural Language (In T. Achourioti et al. (eds.): Unifying the Philosophy of Truth, Springer, 2015) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Inquiry, 2018
Much philosophical attention has been devoted to the truth predicates of natural language and their logic. However, lexical truth predicates are neither necessary nor sufficient for a truthattribution to occur, which warrants closer attention to the grammar of truth attribution. A unified analysis of five constructions is offered here, in two of which the lexical truth predicate occurs (It's true that John left and That John left is true), while in the three remaining, it does not (John left; It seems that John left; and It's that John left). This analysis is philosophically significant for four reasons. First, it explains why speakers of natural language find standard instances of Tarski-inspired equivalences (e.g., That John left is true iff John left) intuitively compelling. Second, it derives the widespread 'deflationist' intuition that truth has no substantive content. Third, insofar as the deflationist sees insights on truth as flowing from understanding our practice of truth attribution, it furthers the deflationist agenda through a new analysis of such attributions. Finally, it advances the philosophical project of the 'naturalization' of truth by reducing our understanding of truth to our competence in the grammar of truth, as an aspect of our biological endowment.
Truth Predicates, Truth Bearers, and their Variants
Theories of truth can hardly avoid taking into account how truth is expressed in natural language. Existing theories of truth have generally focused on true occurring with that-clauses. This paper takes a closer look at predicates of truth (and related notions) when they apply to objects as the referents of referential noun phrases, focusing on what I call the 'core' of language. It argues that truth predicates and their variants, predicates of correctness, satisfaction, and validity, do not apply to propositions (not even with that-clauses), but to a range of attitudinal and modal objects, objects we refer to as 'claims', 'beliefs', 'judgments', 'demands', 'promises, 'obligations' etc. As such natural language reflects a notion of truth that is primarily a normative notion conveyed by correct. This normative notion, however, is not action-guiding, but rather constitutive of representational objects independently of any actions that may go along with them (in the sense of Jarvis 2012). The paper furthermore argues that the predicate true is part of a larger class of satisfaction predicates (satisfied, realized, taken up etc). The semantic differences among different satisfaction predicates, the paper will argue, are best accounted for in terms of a truthmaker theory along the lines of Fine's (to appear) truthmaker semantics. Truthmaker semantics also provides a notion of partial content applicable to attitudinal and modal objects, which may exhibit partial correctness, partial satisfaction, and partial validity.
ugr.es
There is an essential aspect of Ramsey's account of truth that has been systematically neglected: his use of the term "prosentence" to explain how truth ascriptions work (vid. Frápolli 2005a). An exception has been Engel and Dokic's book . Ramsey's awareness of the fact that it is easy to understand what truth is, the real difficulty being to say what is it is surprising. His explanation of the fact, that natural languages do not have enough expressions able to play the role that is played in artificial languages by propositional variables is even more surprising. This is an essential role, by the way, one that cannot be dispensed with.
An Observation about Truth (with Implications for Meaning and Language) [PhD dissertation]
This dissertation is a philosophical analysis of the concept of truth. It is a development and defense of the “stratified” or “language-level” conception of truth, first advanced in Alfred Tarski’s 1933 monograph The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages. Although Tarski’s paper had seminal influence both in philosophy and in more technical disciplines, its central philosophical claim has not been generally accepted. This work has two central goals: (a) to give a detailed and analytic presentation of Tarski’s theory and the problems it faces; (b) to offer a solution to these problems and assess the philosophical significance of this solution. The essay is divided in two parts. Part One contains a detailed and analytic presentation and interpretation of the stratified conception of truth. The analysis contains several steps: (a) Crucial basic assumptions, such as the limitation to formalized languages and the requirement of explicit definitions, are stated explicitly, motivated, and their philosophical significance discussed. (b) The main negative result of the stratified conception, the impossibility of semantic closure and of a universal language, is given in detail and interpreted. (c) Tarski’s criterion for adequate truth definitions, known as Convention T, is stated and motivated. (d) The deep structure of Tarski-style truth definitions and the necessary conditions for their availability are analyzed. In particular, the philosophical significance of Tarski’s notion of “essential richness” is discussed. (e) Finally, several problems are raised for the stratified conception, chief among them the unity objection, according to which the stratified conception is not a viable analysis of the concept of truth, since (by (a) above) an analysis should take the form of a definition, and on the stratified conception different languages have different definitions. There is therefore no one analysis of the concept. Part Two is a development of answers to the problems raised at the end of Part One. The crux of the answer to the unity objection is that Convention T, the adequacy criterion, connects the many definitions of truth into a single concept. However, in order to fulfill that role Convention T must apply universally, and a universal language was shown to be impossible ((c) above). The task of Part Two is therefore to develop a mode of expression that allows the universal applicability of Convention T without commitment to a universal metalanguage. The procedure is as follows. (a) Convention T is formalized in order to isolate the place in which universal applicability is required. (b) A new expressive resource of “abstract generality” is developed. To this purpose a digression into the semantics of natural language indexicals is undertaken. David Kaplan’s thesis of the direct reference of indexicals is analyzed and a new formal system is proposed that embodies it. It is shown that this formal system expresses abstract generality. (c) The notion of abstract generality is adapted to languages without indexicals and it isviii shown that Convention T can be expressed without assuming a universal language. (d) A reconstrual of the task of concept analysis is proposed, which is a generalization of the answer to the unity objection. It is often complained against Tarski’s stratified conception of truth that it is of limited philosophical significance. In this work I show that, on the contrary, the problems it faces and the solutions that can be advanced to answer these problems have substantive philosophical consequences. The notion of abstract generality gives rise to a distinction between two fundamentally different modes of discourse: a universal but merely abstract methodological discourse on the one hand, and a concrete but inevitably restricted theoretical discourse on the other. This distinction has many important implications for our understanding of the concepts of truth, meaning and language.
On the Truth of Linguistic Propositions
Problems of Methodology and Philosophy in Linguistics
In the present paper I analyse propositions functioning in linguistics from the point of view of the criteria of truth imposed on the propositions within the so-called correspondence theory of truth, coherence theory of truth, and pragmatic theory of truth in its sociological version. There exists in linguistic circulation a certain group of propositions which on some assumptions are in agreement with Tarski's explication. The truth of each sentence from the second group can be predicated only when they are juxtaposed with sentences belonging to a concrete system of propositions. The analysed sentence will be recognised as false in a different system. Some systems of sentences may recognise the criteria of evaluation as inadequate, they are, however, not sufficiently sharp so as to enable to make the final decision about the supremacy of one concrete system of sentences over the others. In linguistics there also exist many sentences which are true in linguists' view, although they are not coherent with a certain system of sentences-the propositions belonging to this system may lead to different conclusions. It is the last group of sentences that in the eyes of postmodernists constitutes an argument supporting the thesis that in science (particularly in the humanities) we deal only with accumulating narratives. The major objective of this paper is, however, to prove that the propositions which belong to the third group, although frequent in linguistics, do not belong to its centre-they are only a complement of what may be described by the name of linguistic discourse.
On truth of linguistic propositions
Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, 2009
In the present paper I analyse propositions functioning in linguistics from the point of view of the criteria of truth imposed on the propositions within the so-called correspondence theory of truth, coherence theory of truth, and pragmatic theory of truth in its sociological version. There exists in linguistic circulation a certain group of propositions which on some assumptions are in agreement with Tarski's explication. The truth of each sentence from the second group can be predicated only when they are juxtaposed with sentences belonging to a concrete system of propositions. The analysed sentence will be recognised as false in a different system. Some systems of sentences may recognise the criteria of evaluation as inadequate, they are, however, not sufficiently sharp so as to enable to make the final decision about the supremacy of one concrete system of sentences over the others. In linguistics there also exist many sentences which are true in linguists' view, although they are not coherent with a certain system of sentences-the propositions belonging to this system may lead to different conclusions. It is the last group of sentences that in the eyes of postmodernists constitutes an argument supporting the thesis that in science (particularly in the humanities) we deal only with accumulating narratives. The major objective of this paper is, however, to prove that the propositions which belong to the third group, although frequent in linguistics, do not belong to its centre-they are only a complement of what may be described by the name of linguistic discourse.
Truth-Predicates Still Not like Pronouns: a Reply to Salis
Philosophia
I here respond to Pietro Salis's objections against my original critique of the Prosentential Theory of Truth (PT). In addition, I clarify some points regarding the relationship between anaphoric relationships and Bgeneral semantic notions^like Bequivalence^, Bconsequence^, and Bsameness of content^, and make some further points about (PT)'s ability gto explain pragmatic and expressive features of Btrue^.
Some Arguments For the Operational Reading of Truth Expressions (co-author: Jan Wawrzyniak)
The main question of our article is: what is the logical form of statements containing expressions such as “… is true” and “it is true that …”? We claim that these expressions are generally not used in order to assign a certain property to sentences. We indicate that a predicative interpretation of these expressions was rejected by Frege and adherents of the prosentential conception of truth. We treat these expressions as operators. The main advantage of our operational reading is the fact that it adequately represents how words “true” and “truth” function in everyday speech. Our approach confirms the intuition that so-called T-equivalences are not contingent truths and explains why they seem to be – in some sense – necessary sentences. Moreover, our operational reading of truth expressions dissolves problems arising from the belief that there is some specific property – truth. The fact that we reject that truth is a certain property does not mean that we deny that the concept of truth plays a very important role in our language, and hence in our life. We indicate that the concept of truth is inseparable from the concept of sentence and vice versa – it is impossible to explicate one of these concepts without an appeal to the other. Analiza i Egzystencja, 24 (2013), pp. 61-86