On some aspects of the concept of truth (original) (raw)
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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 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.
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.
Toward a Discovery of Truth in the Study of Verbal Meaning
ATHENS JOURNAL OF PHILOLOGY
The question in focus is the reliability of the analysis of imaginative literature for truth or referential meaning and the validity of the method. The paper is a work in stylistics supported with basic references. While truth in language is a matter of propositional logic, truth in literature is a side question, as the notion of truth in literature is gleaned from evaluative meaning in the analysis of which intuition and subjective opinion matter. Yet the assessment of truth in literature is subject to faultless logic and credible literary material. What is methodologically new belongs to recent studies of style and encompasses qualitative analysis and a functional method derived from a study of uses of language. The analysis is based on the method of close reading and includes Method II described by Stephen Ullman. This method focuses on sense effects and traces them down to the devices that produce them; it is thus in line with recent linguistic theory. Other methodological principles include the concept of three levels of meaning in stylistics-the semantic, the metasemiotic and the metametasemiotic-and the criterion of relevance in the analysis. Research material in overview reveals how representation of routine matters, science and scientists, the popular press, and people and places are evaluated and what this signifies to the analyst. It is found that evaluation in the above descriptions is credible as it can be confirmed by experience, which ultimately means that referential truth can be gleaned in fiction analytically, yet can be confirmed only experientially or logically. The method based on the tracing of evaluative meaning is viable, but the experiential criterion is temporary. Representation in the novel under analysis has national and cross-cultural significance through universal and culturally shared evaluative senses.
LINGUISTIK TERAPAN
Meaning is the essence of language. It has been one of the main concerns in the study of language since the age of Plato and Aristotle. There have been various theories of meaning but only a few explains ‘what one knows when s/he is said to know the meaning of linguistic expressions’. Truth-conditional theory of meaning is one of them – not to say the only theory of meaning – which explains ‘what one knows when s/he is said to know the meaning of linguistic expressions’. However, it has been little paid attention to by theorists working on linguistic meaning since the decline of the ideal language philosophy. It happens so because it is basically misunderstood, i.e. the misunderstanding between linguistic proposition and epistemic proposition in the correspondence theory of truth. This paper revives the significance of the truth-conditional theory of meaning in understanding what constitutes the meaning of linguistic expressions when one is said to know it.
International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2009
Anil Gupta's book Empiricism and Experience (2006) is a rich and complex piece of work, whose main aim is to elucidate the rational contribution of experience to knowledge. A minimally complete account and assessment of this work would be too ambitious a task for us to undertake. In fact, our purpose in this contribution will be quite modest. We intend to comment, in a critical spirit, on a distinction that Gupta uses in this work and that he had already introduced in a previous article of his, "Meaning and Misconceptions" (1999), namely the distinction between the absolute and the effective content of an assertion. The distinction is meant to explain how some of our assertions can engage with the world and actually be true even if they involve a wrong, or even incoherent, conception of things. In the context of Empiricism and Experience, one role of the distinction is to help us understand how some assertions about sense-data (such as: "That orange sense-datum is oval") can have an intelligible, even true, content even if sense-data theories of the given in experience lead to scepticism or to idealism and are quite probably false. The aforementioned distinction may dissipate this apparent conflict. However, we take this distinction to have rather unwelcome consequences and we think Gupta's work would be better off without it. Let us argue for this contention. An example of Gupta's may shed some additional light on the nature and role of the distinction we are considering. Suppose that an ancient, geocentric astronomer says, "The Sun is in the constellation Capricorn today." Intuitively, we feel that there is * Research for this paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, in the framework of the projects HUM2005-04665/FISO and HUM2006-04907. Our thanks to this institution for its help and encouragement. We also thank an anonymous referee for this journal for helpful critical remarks.